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

Taiwan condemns ‘contemptible’ China-Russia partnership on eve of Olympics
Shock in France after giant trawler sheds 100,000 dead fish off coast
Nick Gibb becomes latest Conservative MP to call for Boris Johnson to resign
Winter Olympics day one: golden start for Norway, ski jumping and more – live!
Rescue workers in Morocco edge closer to boy trapped in well
Cyclone Batsirai poses ‘serious threat to millions’ in Madagascar
Tortured Guantánamo prisoner accused of September 11 links should be released – US panel
Calls for protection of LGBTQ+ people after spate of hate crimes in Cardiff
Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing
‘Secret sauce of success’: levelling-up report co-author on why UK should be like Renaissance Florence
Covid news: Nadine Dorries says under pressure PM ‘very positive’; death toll in US hits 900k – live
US Covid death toll surpasses 900,000
Marian Keyes: ‘Rehab was one of the happiest times of my life’
Ribs and dogs: Gary Lee’s recipes for the Super Bowl
I was shooting coke between chapters of Dostoevsky – but eventually books would save me from addiction
Flying high: how a photo of a Syrian father and son led to a new life in Italy
How the growing Russian ransomware threat is costing companies dear
‘Something’s coming’: is America finally ready to take UFOs seriously?
‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s only vaccine victory turned sour
Urn of stillborn child’s ashes stolen from home in Birmingham
The Parthenon marbles belong in Greece – so why is restitution so hard to swallow? | Charlotte Higgins
Her son died at the hands of Louisiana police. She’s still waiting for answers, 1,000 days on
‘We need politicians and experts’: how Chile is putting the climate crisis first
Rifle training in Ukraine and Brazil’s homeless: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

Taiwan condemns ‘contemptible’ China-Russia partnership on eve of Olympics

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 08:31 PM PST

Taipei calls 'no limits' agreement announced after Xi-Putin summit an insult to the Olympic spirit

Taiwan has condemned as "contemptible" the timing of China and Russia's "no limits" partnership at the start of the Winter Olympics, saying the Chinese government was bringing shame to the spirit of the Games.

China and Russia, at a meeting of their leaders hours before the Winter Olympics officially opened, backed each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the west.

Shock in France after giant trawler sheds 100,000 dead fish off coast

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 07:29 PM PST

Environmentalists spot floating carpet of blue whiting covering thousands of square metres after spill from the FV Margiris

Dutch-owned trawler FV Margiris, the world's second-biggest fishing vessel, has shed more than 100,000 dead fish into the Atlantic Ocean off France.

France's maritime minister, Annick Girardin, called the images of the dead fish – which formed a floating carpet of carcasses spotted by environmental campaigners – "shocking" and has asked the national fishing surveillance authority to launch an investigation.

Nick Gibb becomes latest Conservative MP to call for Boris Johnson to resign

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 02:13 PM PST

MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton says his constituents were 'furious about the double standards' of the PM

Another Conservative MP has called for Boris Johnson to resign.

Nick Gibb, the MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, said his constituents were "furious about the double standards" and said the prime minister had been "inaccurate" in his statements to the Commons.

Winter Olympics day one: golden start for Norway, ski jumping and more – live!

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:45 AM PST

Updates from Beijing as first medals of the Games are won
Winter Olympics: schedule and live scores
Winter Games 2022: 10 things to look out for in Beijing
Any thoughts? Email Niall or tweet @niallmcveigh

Aussie Jakara Anthony Goes Top

The Victorian unleashes a scintillating run to go top in qualifying for the Women's Moguls. She even pipped the peerless Frenchwoman Perrine Laffont, a former gold medallist. Commentary, rather curiously, is being provided by former cricketer Dirk Nannes.

Rescue workers in Morocco edge closer to boy trapped in well

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:29 AM PST

Five-year-old called Rayan fell and became trapped on Tuesday in hill town of Chefchaouen

Moroccan rescuers have worked through the night to rescue a five-year-old boy trapped underground in a well in northern Morocco.

The complex, slow and risky earth-moving operation has gripped residents of the north African kingdom and even sparked sympathy in neighbouring Algeria, a regional rival.

Cyclone Batsirai poses ‘serious threat to millions’ in Madagascar

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 01:50 AM PST

Residents brace for powerful winds and torrential rains forecast to hit east of Indian Ocean island on Saturday

Cyclone Batsirai was expected to reach eastern Madagascar on Saturday, posing a "very serious threat" to millions with powerful winds and torrential rains set to batter the large Indian Ocean island.

Residents hunkered down before the storm's arrival and winds of more than 124mph (200km/h) were forecast as it bore down on the country still recovering from the deadly Tropical Storm Ana in late January.

Tortured Guantánamo prisoner accused of September 11 links should be released – US panel

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 10:05 PM PST

Government board says Mohammed al-Qahtani, who now has significant mental health issues, should be repatriated to Saudi Arabia

US authorities have recommended releasing an inmate with significant mental health issues from Guantánamo Bay and repatriating him to Saudi Arabia, according to a government document published Friday.

Suspected of being al-Qaida's intended 20th hijacker for the September 11, 2001 attacks, Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured by interrogators at the US military base in Cuba where he has been detained for nearly two decades.

Calls for protection of LGBTQ+ people after spate of hate crimes in Cardiff

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 12:00 AM PST

Homophobic murder of a consultant psychiatrist in July 2021 was among several crimes recorded at that time

Campaigners in Cardiff are calling for the police and other authorities to do more to protect LGBTQ+ people after it emerged the sadistic homophobic murder of a consultant psychiatrist was only one of a spate of hate crimes recorded at the time.

A vigil is to be held near Bute Park in the city on Sunday after a 17-year-old girl and two men were found guilty of murdering Dr Gary Jenkins by beating him and stamping on his head for 15 minutes in the early hours of a morning in July last year.

Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 10:00 PM PST

Officials in Woodside – a mansion-filled, tech entrepreneur enclave – claim wildcat land keeps them from building multi-unit homes

At first glance, the town of Woodside may look more like a sprawl of mansions built on big-tech billions than crucial habitat for threatened California mountain lions.

But town officials might suggest looking again.

‘Secret sauce of success’: levelling-up report co-author on why UK should be like Renaissance Florence

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 11:30 PM PST

Andy Haldane says city's crucible-like atmosphere created 'combustion' for economic prosperity

The government's new levelling-up strategy should help Britain's left-behind towns and cities emulate Renaissance Florence in cooking up the "secret sauce" of economic success, according to its co-author Andy Haldane.

The hefty report, published on Wednesday, was mocked by some for its frequent historical references – including to 15th-century Florence under the Medici – but Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, is deadly serious.

Covid news: Nadine Dorries says under pressure PM ‘very positive’; death toll in US hits 900k – live

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:36 AM PST

UK culture secretary attacks those speaking out against Johnson over partygate; figures in US come less than two months after eclipsing 800,000

Hong Kong reported 351 cases of coronavirus on Saturday, a record daily high since the outbreak of the pandemic, reports Reuters.

This adds further pressure on the government's "dynamic zero-Covid" strategy as other major cities opt to live with the virus.

US Covid death toll surpasses 900,000

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 03:54 PM PST

The two-year total compiled by Johns Hopkins University comes less than two months after eclipsing 800,000 deaths

Propelled in part by the wildly contagious Omicron variant, the US death toll from Covid-19 hit 900,000 on Friday, less than two months after eclipsing 800,000.

The two-year total, as compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Charlotte, North Carolina.

Marian Keyes: ‘Rehab was one of the happiest times of my life’

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 01:45 AM PST

As her beloved character Rachel returns, older and sober, the Irish author discusses her own journey from addiction to recovery - and the sexist snobbery that surrounds her work

Marian Keyes is in bed. It's two o'clock in the afternoon, but she has just got back from a funeral and was feeling chilly. "It was a beautiful send off," she says in her southern Irish lilt, as reassurance that she's OK to talk. She is wearing a lilac hoodie and flashes a pastel pink manicure (a Keyes heroine would know the shade) as she rearranges the pillows to get comfy. Within a few minutes it feels as if we are both having tea and biscuits under the duvet at her Dún Laoghaire home outside Dublin, as she gives me a virtual tour of her bedroom.

So far, so Marian Keyes. Loved by readers for her chatty style and satisfying storylines, she was for many years dubbed the queen of chick lit, a phrase now as passé as Daniel Cleaver's chat-up lines in Bridget Jones's Diary. In fact, her novels have tackled hefty issues such as addiction (Rachel's Holiday), bereavement (Anybody Out There), domestic violence (This Charming Man) and depression (The Mystery of Mercy Close), always with her trademark lightness of touch. Yet despite selling more than 35m copies over the years, she is too often dismissed as a popular writer of books with pink covers (both of which are fine by her, thanks for asking).

Ribs and dogs: Gary Lee’s recipes for the Super Bowl

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:00 AM PST

Recipes for Superbowl 56 next weekend from the kitchen of Joe Allen in Covent Garden: slow-braised smoked baby back ribs and vegetarian hot dogs with quinoa chilli. Touchdown!

I'm a huge sports fan, so revel in everything around a big sporting event: getting friends over, the TV set up and, of course, prepping the ultimate game-day spread. The Super Bowl next weekend is the perfect excuse to get some American-style dishes on the go, and it wouldn't be right if I didn't make a couple of Joe Allen classics. Today's recipes have been a closely guarded secret – or at least until now – and, regardless of whether or not you're a meat eater, together they make the perfect finger food for everyone who can't take their eyes off the screen.

UK readers: click to buy these ingredients from Ocado

I was shooting coke between chapters of Dostoevsky – but eventually books would save me from addiction

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:00 AM PST

At first, I could hardly get through a novel. But slowly reading – and writing – saved me from a life of drugs, rehab and jail

When I was in tenth grade in Tampa, Florida, I was, like millions of other high school students, assigned to read The Catcher in the Rye for English class. Like millions of other high school students, I was extremely fragile. I was holding on by a thread. I was 15 and spent much of my time at school, on the days I would go, doing OxyContin, Xanax, cocaine and speed in the bathroom. I jittered and itched through class, and my internal life was, to say the least, stifled. It would continue to be stifled for the next few years, until it became so claustrophobic that I attempted suicide. Needless to say, I was pretty hit or miss with school assignments. But I had always liked to read. I decided to crack Salinger's book and read a chapter or two. I stayed up all night and finished it. I came into class the next day wired, eyes wide: it felt as if I had been hooked up to a car battery. I remember walking into the classroom and saying to my English teacher, "What the hell was that?"

I didn't know anything about the book. I didn't know that the men who shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were both obsessed with it. I didn't know that it was the subject of endless think pieces debating the ethical ramifications of Holden Caulfield's character. I didn't know Salinger stormed the beaches on D-Day, carried scars from his years in war. I just got sucked in. It is a funny, polarising little book. I remember my girlfriend at the time saying she hated it, that she couldn't get through it. But my teacher told me that every year at least one person does what I did, gets hooked up to the car battery. Looking back, it makes sense that someone in my particular situation would have this reaction to it. In fact, it is almost embarrassing just how cliched it is. But that's what happened. And, in what would become a theme of my life, what stuck with me more than any of the particular content of the book was the feeling of being sucked in, of losing time trapped in someone else's words and turbulent emotions.

Flying high: how a photo of a Syrian father and son led to a new life in Italy

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 12:30 AM PST

A tender moment captured by Mehmet Aslan of Munzir al-Nazzal and his son, both survivors of the Syrian war, prompted Italian organisations to act. A year on, they are settling into life in Tuscany

In January last year, while working on the Turkish-Syrian border, photojournalist Mehmet Aslan photographed a Syrian man, Munzir al-Nazzal, who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. Munzir was playing with Mustafa, his 5-year-old son, who was born without limbs, and the shot portrayed the father, propped up on a crutch, raising his smiling child into the air.

Aslan entitled his photograph Hardship of Life.

How the growing Russian ransomware threat is costing companies dear

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 02:00 AM PST

With KP Snacks the latest cyber-attack victim, firms must learn to defend themselves against a mounting menace

The January snow lay thick on the Moscow ground, as masked officers of the FSB – Russia's fearsome security agency – prepared to smash down the doors at one of 25 addresses they would raid that day.

Their target was REvil, a shadowy conclave of hackers that claimed to have stolen more than $100m (£74m) a year through "ransomware" attacks, before suddenly disappearing.

‘Something’s coming’: is America finally ready to take UFOs seriously?

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 12:00 AM PST

UFO-watchers say 2022 could prove a bumper year, as clamor for details grows in the wake of a highly anticipated report

Last year was a breakthrough time for UFOs, as a landmark government report prompted the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors to finally be taken seriously by everyone from senators, to a former president, to the Pentagon.

But 2022 could be even more profound, experts say, as the clamor for UFO disclosure and discovery continues to grow, and as new scientific projects bring us closer than ever to – potentially – discovering non-Earth life.

‘Trump is not my God’: how the former president’s only vaccine victory turned sour

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 11:00 PM PST

A rigid anti-vaccine stance among Trump's supporters means Republicans can't reap the benefits of Operation Warp Speed

She is fiercely loyal to Donald Trump. But when the former US president came to her home city and praised coronavirus vaccines, Flora Moore did something she never thought possible. She booed him.

"He said take the vaccine but we all booed and said no," she recalled of Trump's event with broadcaster Bill O'Reilly in Orlando, Florida. "He heard us loud and clear because the Amway Center was packed. We let him know 'no' and a couple of us even hollered out, 'It's killing people!'"

Urn of stillborn child’s ashes stolen from home in Birmingham

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:21 AM PST

Police issue 'desperate' appeal for information after burglary on Friday in Garretts Green

Police have appealed for help after a burglar stole an urn containing the ashes of a child.

West Midlands police said the urn was taken on Friday after someone broke into a home on Clopton Road in Garrett's Green, Birmingham.

The Parthenon marbles belong in Greece – so why is restitution so hard to swallow? | Charlotte Higgins

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 01:00 AM PST

Repatriating the spoils of empire is stuck in all manner of legal and historical impasses that preserve the status quo

Those who would see the Parthenon marbles return to Greece sense change in the air. As the politics of identity resurge, as the legacies of colonialism are scrutinised, Benin bronzes held in Aberdeen and Cambridge have been sent back to Nigeria, those in Glasgow are the subject of a formal request, and those in Germany are to return too. The Benin bronzes – looted by the British in a punitive raid on Benin City in 1897 – are a very different case from the sculptures that once adorned the great temple of Athens' patron goddess on the city's Acropolis, acquired (or so it is argued) legally by Lord Elgin in 1801. But still: Palermo's Archaeological Museum has just sent its share of the Parthenon sculptures to the Acropolis Museum – on loan, but with talk of a permanent arrangement.

The Palermo sculpture is a shoe-box-size fragment showing part of the goddess Artemis's foot, rather than the 75m of frieze plus magnificent pediment held in the British Museum, but still, it's a precedent of sorts. The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, made return of the Parthenon marbles a talking point on a recent visit to London. Even the Times has reversed its leader line to support repatriation. "Separating components of an artistic whole is like tearing Hamlet out of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works," says its editorial – though bringing the Bloomsbury sculptures to Athens would not complete anything at all, since half of the stonework is destroyed, and they will never be intact again.

Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian's chief culture writer

Her son died at the hands of Louisiana police. She’s still waiting for answers, 1,000 days on

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 12:00 AM PST

Police are accused of a cover-up in Ronald Greene's death – and now the governor has had to deny political interference. Mona Hardin, Greene's mother, says enough is enough

Thursday marked 1,000 days since Ronald Greene died on a roadside in northern Louisiana. And the 1,000th day, too, that Greene's mother, Mona Hardin, has awaited answers from state and federal authorities.

"It's hard to sleep," Hardin told the Guardian in an interview. "But it's something I have to push myself through. It has destroyed my family, because of what we saw and what we know."

‘We need politicians and experts’: how Chile is putting the climate crisis first

Posted: 05 Feb 2022 03:06 AM PST

President Gabriel Boric has brought renowned named climate scientist Maisa Rojas into government to help ensure a greener future

Hidden behind the Andes in a quiet corner of South America, a formidable generation of former student leaders are putting together one of the world's most exciting progressive movements.

On 11 March, Gabriel Boric, 35, a tattooed leftist with a steely resolve to reform Chile from the bottom up, will become the country's youngest ever president – and his green agenda is echoing across the world as time ticks away on an impending climate catastrophe.

Rifle training in Ukraine and Brazil’s homeless: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

Posted: 04 Feb 2022 11:30 PM PST

A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mandalay to Montevideo