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

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


Myanmar coup: health workers at 70 hospitals join civil disobedience campaign

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:07 PM PST

Medical staff accuse military chiefs of prioritising their own interests above those of the public during the pandemic

Staff at dozens of hospitals across Myanmar stopped working on Wednesday as part of a growing civil disobedience campaign, one of the first organised acts of defiance against the military after it ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Health workers in 70 hospitals and medical departments in Naypyidaw, Yangon and other towns and cities said they would not work under the military regime, accusing the generals of placing their own priorities above those of ordinary people during the pandemic.

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Alexei Navalny: 1,000 arrested after protests over jailing of Russian opposition leader

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:10 PM PST

Court locks up Putin's foe despite threat of protests and international condemnation

A Moscow court has sentenced Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a prison colony in a landmark decision for Vladimir Putin's crackdown on the country's leading opposition figure.

The move triggered marches in Moscow and the arrest of more than 1,000 protesters.

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'Ambush' lockdowns: Hong Kong tries radical Covid testing strategy

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:23 PM PST

Authorities take to sealing off residential blocks without warning and can break into homes if people do not submit to testing

Hong Kong is locking down entire residential blocks without warning as part of a controversial new strategy to contain outbreaks of Covid-19.

Over the past 10 days, squads of Hong Kong police officers have launched "ambush-style" lockdowns of residences, forcing everyone to be tested for Covid-19 or be fined HK$5,000 ($645). Viral footage of one operation showed dozens of officers sprinting up a street, unfurling a roll of tape to cordon off a building and its occupants, as bystanders jump out of the way.

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Academic jailed in Iran pulls off daring escape back to Britain

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 11:00 PM PST

Exclusive: Kameel Ahmady smuggled himself out through mountainous border after being sentenced to nine years

A British Iranian dual national sentenced to nine years and three months in jail in Iran for co-operating with "a hostile state power" has smuggled himself out of Iran, escaping over the country's treacherous mountainous border, and is now living in London.

In an interview with the Guardian, Kameel Ahmady explained he felt had no option but to flee after spending nearly 100 days in Evin prison, including a brutal spell in solitary confinement while he was being interrogated.

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Up in flames: SpaceX Starship test flight ends in fiery crash, again

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 03:11 PM PST

  • Futuristic rocket explodes on landing after test in Texas
  • Elon Musk developing Starship to carry people to Mars

SpaceX's second full test flight of its futuristic, bullet-shaped Starship ended in another fiery crash landing on Tuesday.

Elon Musk's company launched its latest Starship prototype from the south-eastern tip of Texas, two months after the previous test ended in an equally explosive belly flop.

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Twelve Mexican police arrested over mass killing of migrants near US border

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 09:57 PM PST

Officers face homicide charges over the deaths of 19 people, including suspected Guatemalan migrants, in Tamaulipas state

A dozen Mexican police officers have been arrested for allegedly killing 19 people, including Guatemalan migrants, whose bodies were found shot and burned near the US border late in January.

The Tamaulipas state attorney-general, Irving Barrios Mojica, said all 12 officers were in custody and face charges of homicide, abuse of authority and making false statements.

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Northern Ireland: UK asks EU to extend grace periods on Brexit checks

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 01:51 AM PST

Bloc urged to delay full enforcement of checks on goods traded between Britain and Northern Ireland until 2023

The Cabinet Office minister, Michael Gove, has asked the EU for an extension to 2023 of the grace periods for full checks on goods traded between Britain and Northern Ireland.

The bloc's normal rules on customs and product standards are not yet being fully enforced in the Irish Sea but those that are being conducted have led to threatening behaviour towards border officials.

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Independence could cost Scotland's economy £11bn a year, forecast suggests

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 11:00 PM PST

Economists say impact of leaving UK's common market would hit two to three times as hard as leaving EU

Scotland's economy would shrink by at least £11bn a year if it became independent, more than doubling the damaging impacts of Brexit, a team of economists has forecast.

The report from the London School of Economics and City University of Hong Kong found that quitting the UK's common market would hit the Scottish economy two to three times as hard as leaving the EU, just counting the impact on trade alone.

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New claims of migrant abuse as Ice defies Biden to continue deportations

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 03:50 PM PST

Ice condemned as 'rogue agency' after rights groups allege torture by agents and man deported to Haiti who had never been there

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been denounced as a "rogue agency" after new allegations of assaults on asylum seekers emerged, and deportations of African and Caribbean migrants continued in defiance of the Biden administration's orders.

Joe Biden unveiled his immigration agenda on Tuesday, and his homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was confirmed by the Senate, but the continued deportations suggested the Biden White House still does not have full control of Ice, which faces multiple allegations of human rights abuses and allegations that it has disproportionately targeted black migrants.

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Second lawyer barred after defending Hong Kong democracy activist

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 04:22 PM PST

Ren Quanniu, who acted for one of the 12 people who tried to flee territory by boat, says revocation is 'groundless'

A second Chinese lawyer has lost his licence after defending a Hong Kong democracy activist charged with illegally leaving the territory.

Ren Quanniu, who represented one of 12 people caught attempting to flee Hong Kong to Taiwan by boat in August 2020, received a court notice on Tuesday revoking his right to practise.

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US toddler to release debut album recorded in the womb

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 01:37 AM PST

Luca Yupanqui was recorded by her parents using 'biosonic MIDI technology'

An American toddler, Luca Yupanqui, is gearing up to release her debut album, the world's first LP made from sounds inside the womb.

Her parents are Elizabeth Hart, a member of psych-rock band Psychic Ills, and musician Iván Diaz Mathé, who has worked with Lee "Scratch" Perry and others. In five hour-long "joint meditation" sessions, they recorded Yupanqui in utero via electrodes on Hart's abdomen, and using "biosonic MIDI technology" transcribed the vibrations they picked up into synthesisers.

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Coronavirus live news: WHO team visits Wuhan lab; Covid antibodies protect survivors for six months

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:10 AM PST

Majority of Covid patients develop antibodies that protect them for at least six months; 'vaccine nationalism harmful for all', says WHO

Ukraine has found itself at the back of the European continent's vaccine queue, slower to procure them independently, unwilling to buy from Russia while publicly cajoling the EU for supplies for its 41 million people.

"We were asking the European Union several times to give Ukraine a certain quota of vaccine," health minister Maksym Stepanov told Reuters. "We were ready to pay even more but they decided first to supply their own citizens with the vaccine."

Thailand's resort island of Phuket is planning private coronavirus vaccinations for 250,000 residents in the hope the government will allow it to fully reopen to foreign tourists by October and save its battered economy, industry officials said.

"The people of Phuket are losing hope," Phuket Tourism Association President, Bhummikitti Ruktaengam said, adding that the island's economy was at its lowest point in recent history.

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Belgian regulators advise against giving AstraZeneca Covid vaccine to over-55s

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 01:59 AM PST

Advisory body suggests Oxford jab should be given only to younger people for time being

Regulators in Belgium are the the latest in Europe to advise against the administration of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to older people due a lack of data about its efficacy.

Frank Vandenbroucke, Belgium's health minister, said the country's superior health council, an advisory body, had suggested the jab should be administered to people younger than 55 for the time being.

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Extend furlough or risk mass unemployment, industry and unions warn Sunak

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:00 PM PST

Exclusive: TUC and top business groups fear economy is too fragile to end scheme in April as planned

Rishi Sunak has been warned by the leaders of Britain's most influential business groups and the trade union movement that he risks plunging Britain into a period of mass unemployment unless he extends the furlough scheme.

Before the budget on 3 March, both sides of industry told the chancellor that the economy was too fragile to end the wage subsidy scheme at the end of April and that he risked undoing the efforts to protect jobs over the past year if he did so.

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Decades of progress on extreme poverty now in reverse due to Covid

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 11:15 PM PST

Analysis: The pandemic, combined with the climate crisis and crippling debt burdens, has led to an 'unprecedented increase' in poverty, experts warn

Two decades of progress in the reduction of extreme poverty, the elimination of which is one of the sustainable development goals, have been pushed into a sharp reverse by a combination of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing climate emergency and increasing debt.

With the World Bank warning of a "truly unprecedented increase" in levels of poverty this year, and renewing calls for debt forgiveness, experts are warning of a growing crisis in multiple areas from education to employment, likely to be felt for years to come.

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52 perfect comfort films – to watch again and again

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:00 PM PST

Samantha Morton loves The Apartment, while David Baddiel prefers Ratatouille. Film-makers, writers and Guardian readers on the movies they always curl up with

I have a clutch of comfort-blanket movies, but this is currently my favourite, and I blush to think I once derided it. Meryl Streep is imperishably enjoyable in this adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's novel, reportedly inspired by Anna Wintour. Anne Hathaway plays the callow college grad who flukes a job at the colossally prestigious fashion magazine Runway, edited by Streep's terrifying Miranda Priestly, the boss from hell. Stanley Tucci is wonderful as her long-serving, longsuffering senior executive and this was the film that launched the elegant Emily Blunt on the world, as the super-snobbish fashionista who is to be Hathaway's unwilling guide. Peter Bradshaw, Guardian film critic

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Deutschland 89: 'We filmed it in the Stasi's old HQ – it's a horror museum'

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:00 PM PST

The fall of the Berlin Wall was greeted with jubilation – but it also unleashed chaos and fear. As the cold war TV spy saga reaches 1989, its writers and stars recall those tumultuous days

When Joerg Winger did his military service in West Germany, he was given the job of snooping on Russian troops stationed in the GDR, or East Germany, the authoritarian regime on the other side of the iron curtain. "It was the 80s," Joerg says. "I was a radio signaller. And one Christmas, I remember the Russians wishing our officers seasons greetings – using their names. So we knew we must have a mole. That was the origin of the story."

Joerg is talking about his tense, thrilling and superbly wardrobed Deutschland TV series, which returns this month for its third and final outing. He created it with his wife, Anna, who had the idea of telling the story from the perspective of the mole. Enter our long-suffering young protagonist Martin Rauch, who goes undercover in the west and never seems more than five seconds away from being exposed.

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'It's sheer! It's queer!': redesigning and diversifying beauty ads of the past

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 11:33 PM PST

A new photo project revives 70s advertisements for beauty products yet recasts them with racially diverse and LGBTQ models

Long before makeup moguls like Jeffree Star and Kylie Jenner were selling lip kits and mystery boxes on Instagram, there was the old-fashioned way of selling beauty products – in the pages of women's magazines.

Thin white women posed alongside phrases like "Lashes" or "Great look, great body, great mascara!" while donning blue eyeshadow and bright bursts of pink blush.

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The Aids angel: how Ruth Coker Burks comforted dying gay men

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:00 AM PST

In the 80s, a young mother with no medical training or resources looked after scores of ostracised patients – and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on her lawn. Now she is paying tribute to the lost

Ruth Coker Burks has never been an obedient person. When she was visiting a friend in hospital and noticed a nearby door covered in red tarpaulin, the word "biohazard" stamped across it, she lingered. She watched the nurses draw straws, or toothpicks, to decide who would enter the room; then she watched them all walk away. In that moment, she knew: "I was going in there."

The man in the room was so thin and white that he could barely be seen against the bedsheets. "I asked him if I could help," Coker Burks says. "He wanted his mother. I thought: 'Oh, OK, well that's great. I can do that. Then I've done my good deed.'"

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Colombia's forgotten ex-guerrillas still waiting for peace dividend

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:00 AM PST

A tumbledown camp is home to many former Farc rebels four years after peace accords while hundreds more have been killed

Daniela Márquez, 30, bears the scars of Colombia's long civil war on her body. Until three years ago, she was a medic with what was then South America's most powerful guerrilla army: the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

Five years ago, while her commanders were suing for peace, an airstrike killed seven of her comrades and hurled pieces of shrapnel into her arms, legs and back.

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We need to talk: the linguistic clues that reveal your relationship is over

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 08:27 AM PST

A new study shows that months before a breakup, a partner's language can change subtly. Here's what to look out for

Name: The language of breakups

Age: Timeless. Ever since Eve ate that ill-fated pomegranate, romantic relationships have been problematic. And people have to find a way of saying goodbye. But this particular ...

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Firm running asylum-seeker barracks in Kent stands to earn £1bn

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:20 AM PST

Ten-year government contracts to Clearsprings Ready Homes come into focus after complaints over living conditions

A company that runs the army barracks at the centre of a row over living conditions faced by asylum seekers stands to earn up to £1bn over 10 years for its government work, delivering multimillion-pound benefits for its owner.

Clearsprings Ready Homes, owned by Essex businessman Graham King, runs Napier barracks in Kent, where hundreds of asylum seekers have told of poor conditions and going without heating and drinking water after a fire.

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Second-hand clothing mountain piles up as Brexit halts exports to EU

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:00 AM PST

Deliveries of items given to charities for sale on the continent have fallen foul of rules of origin requirements

A mountain of used goods is building up in the north-east of England as one of the biggest exporters of second-hand clothing to the EU has suffered a breakdown in trade caused by Brexit.

Since January, exports to the EU from ECS Textiles in North Shields have ground to a halt due to border delays, piles of paperwork and confusion over post-Brexit rules, costing charities thousands of pounds in lost donations each week.

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General Idi Amin takes over supreme power in Uganda – archive, 3 February 1971

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 09:30 PM PST

3 February 1971: General Amin proclaims himself head of state, dissolves parliament and appoints a purely advisory council of ministers

Kampala, 2 February
General Amin, the new ruler of Uganda, today proclaimed himself Supreme Commander and Head of State, dissolved Parliament, and appointed a purely advisory Council of Ministers. The council consists mainly of noncontroversial civilian administrators.

Related: Curfew in Uganda after military coup topples Obote

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New push to rename Donald Trump state park amid complaints

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:20 AM PST

Lawmakers and residents hope name change could spotlight social justice – and encourage donations

For years, Sandy Galef has received complaints and questions from many of her constituents over the Donald J Trump state park in suburban New York.

And since Trump's supporters stormed the US Capitol earlier this year, lawmakers, advocates and residents are once again pushing to rename the underdeveloped 436-acre park in hopes of sparking a dialogue on social justice and spurring much-needed private contributions to improve the space.

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They came at night: how a Spanish crew shot an alternative Dracula after Bela Lugosi had gone to bed

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:18 AM PST

Ninety years ago, two groundbreaking horror movies were made: Lugosi's official chiller and a covert version – which might just be its superior

They came under the shadow of darkness – quite literally. Just as Dracula star Bela Lugosi was no doubt being tucked up for the night, director George Melford, cast and crew made their way on to the Universal studio lot in 1931 to shoot a Spanish-language version of the Bram Stoker 1897 horror novel, filmed using the same sets and costumes as the much more familiar Tod Browning masterwork.

Melford's production of Dracula was what is known as a multiple-language version – AKA MLV – which was one method by which the recently developed sound "talkie" aimed to reach non-English speaking audiences. Initiated by the 1927 release of The Jazz Singer – which featured 15-minutes of synchronised singing and talking – producers created prints in which dialogue was replaced with music and foreign inter-titles – the "international sound version" – but this became quickly obsolete and close to extinction by 1931. Instead, producers began to make entirely new versions of the same film: Paramount Pictures' Paramount on Parade, directed by Edmund Goulding and released in 1930, saw 13 different releases, with Czech, French, Dutch, Hungarian, German, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Polish, Serbian, Swedish and Spanish as well as English. But the MLV was expensive, and could rarely escape the perception that they were lesser productions.

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Labor senator blames removal of Australian tariffs on Chinese steel for job losses

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 01:29 AM PST

Deb O'Neill says the Coalition is failing to protect local industry from products being 'dumped' at low prices

A Labor senator has accused the government of exposing manufacturing jobs to "unfair trade" arguing the removal of Australian tariffs on steel from China had contributed to the loss of work in the sector.

The New South Wales senator Deb O'Neill also took aim at the Coalition for failing to reform the system that protects local industries from products being "dumped" at low prices and for not living up to its "team Australia" rhetoric.

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'Savage' cuts to UK aid put children's lives at risk, says Gordon Brown

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:30 PM PST

Former prime minister says chancellor is paying bills for Covid 'off the backs of the poor'

The former prime minister Gordon Brown has launched a scathing attack on the unprecedented cuts to UK aid, saying they put at risk tens of thousands of children's lives while millions more face losing an education.

Writing in the Guardian, Brown said the planned cuts of 30% – £5bn – which come into force at the end of next month meant that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was "paying the bills for Covid off the backs of the poor – at home and abroad".

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Rishi Sunak is paying Covid bills off the backs of the poor. It shames our country | Gordon Brown

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 10:30 PM PST

A savage reversal of aid is happening at the very moment people need our help most. MPs must join together to stop it


Nothing shames our country more than Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, paying the bills for Covid off the backs of the poor – at home and abroad.

He has recently pushed off his plan to cut £20 a week from the already low universal credit paid to 6 million of Britain's poorest families.

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The nights of pots and pans are back, on Myanmar's fearful streets

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 04:11 AM PST

Activists are urging a traditional show of solidarity amid wary anger over the military's coup

In Myanmar, if you want to drive evil from your home, you bang pots and pans. Yangon's streets were filled with the din of clashing metal in 2007, when monks called for an end to military rule, and before that, in 1988 when the former president Sein Lwin, or the "butcher of Rangoon", ordered troops to shoot pro-democracy protesters. On Tuesday night, pots and pans were back again.

Evil has returned, they say; Gen Min Aung Hlaing has led a military coup against the democratically elected government and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose immense popularity within the country helped her National League for Democracy (NLD) win a landslide victory in 2020. The military's electoral proxy secured fewer than 7% of available seats, leading it, and the military, to claim widespread electoral "fraud" without evidence.

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We need more than a sprinkle of te reo in our culture for Māori language to thrive | Shilo Kino

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 02:52 PM PST

New Zealanders may be taking an interest in learning reo but the system seems hell-bent on making it difficult

This year I am studying a full immersion te reo Māori course at the renowned Te Wānanga o Takiura. Like many other Māori, I've spent my adult years using my own time, money, energy, and resources in an attempt to learn the language of my ancestors. A language that was stolen from my whānau because Te Tiriti of Waitangi was not honoured. So here I am, out of complete desperation, trying to reclaim and hopefully become fluent in te reo Māori.

At a glance, it seems New Zealanders are taking an interest in learning reo. The number of teenagers studying te reo Māori at secondary school has passed 30,000 for the first time. Māori Made Easy, a language study book by Scotty Morrison, has become a staple in every household. There are waiting lists across the country to get into part-time te reo classes. If this is the case, why won't the Labour government commit to making te reo Māori compulsory in schools?

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Even with vaccines, we still need treatments for Covid. So what works?

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 06:57 AM PST

Analysis: death rates in intensive care are falling as doctors identify more ways to help those with the disease

Vaccines may have been described as the great escape route from the Covid pandemic – but treatments, which are bringing down death rates, will be needed as much as ever in the era of jabs because the virus is not expected to go away in the foreseeable future, experts say.

"It's going to take a long time to vaccinate the world," said Peter Horby of Oxford University, chief investigator of the Recovery trial into Covid treatments and chair of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag). "I don't know what the estimates are, but we've already seen issues with manufacturing scale-up and difficulties in delivering at scale.

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High infection rate makes effort to contain Covid variants even more vital

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 05:54 AM PST

Analysis: scramble to stop spread of South African variant makes sense but may already be too late

When the coronavirus pandemic was in its infancy, one of the common silver linings scientists mentioned was the virus's slow rate of mutation. It raised the hope that the virus lacked the agility to rapidly evolve around human immunity – whether from previous infection or vaccine. The virus is certainly slow to mutate by some standards. Sars-CoV-2 typically acquires two single letter changes in its genetic code a month, about half the rate seen in influenza.

So why are so many new variants emerging? At the heart of the problem is the fact the global pandemic is raging. Every new case is a chance for mutations to arise, spread and build up. In the simple arithmetic of evolution, when a virus mutates and gains an advantage it can rise above the others.

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Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny jailed for two years and eight months – video

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 01:14 PM PST

A court in Moscow has sentenced opposition leader Alexei Navalny to two years and eight months in a penal colony. The original three-and-a-half year sentence was reduced by the 10 months Navalny has already spent under house arrest. The latest charges were for violating parole conditions imposed in 2014 for embezzlement charges. He was arrested on his return from Germany on 17 January where he had been recovering from being poisoned by a nerve agent

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Capt Sir Tom Moore dies at 100 – video report

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 11:56 AM PST

The second world war veteran, who raised almost £39m for NHS charities, has died after testing positive for Covid-19. Moore walked 100 laps around his garden to raise money, earning him his first of two Guinness World Records. He broke his second one when he became the oldest person to reach number one in the UK charts with the single You'll Never Walk Alone, which he recorded with Michael Ball and The NHS Voices of Care Choir. In July, he was knighted by the Queen

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Hancock says UK will 'come down hard' on South Africa Covid variant – video

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 07:18 AM PST

Matt Hancock said the government would take firm action to stamp out the South African Covid variant in the UK. The health secretary said 105 cases of the variant have been identified, including 11 without a direct connection to international travel.  'Our mission must be to stop its spread altogether and break its chains of transmission,' he said, as he summarised door-to-door testing efforts taking place in areas affected

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Coronavirus variants: what you need to know – video explainer

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 06:41 AM PST

Last year, Covid-19 spread around the world, sending millions of people into lockdown as health services struggled to cope. The surge in new variants of the virus  has prompted fresh questions and concerns. The Guardian's health editor, Sarah Boseley, explains what we now know about the Covid-19 variants and what they could mean for the future of the pandemic

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reveals she is a sexual assault survivor – video

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 02:44 AM PST

Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks about how her experience of Capitol riot was affected by her experience as a survivor of sexual assault

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