The US military has formally announced that 2,200 of its troops will be withdrawing from Iraq this month. The move had been widely expected. The US has around 5,200 troops in the country that were deployed to fight the Islamic State militant group. Image: An Iraqi soldiers stands guard in front of US military air
World
The Oxford vaccine trial has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in one of the participants. Researchers have paused the trial while they investigate the unexplained illness of a volunteer in the UK. “As part of the ongoing randomised, controlled global trials of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine, our standard review
One of Belarus’s most prominent opposition leaders, Maria Kolesnikova, has been detained by state security at the border between Belarus and Ukraine almost 24 hours after she was abducted from the centre of Minsk by masked men. According to news agency Interfax Ukraine, Ms Kolesnikova ripped up her passport to prevent herself from being forcibly
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been taken out of an induced coma after his suspected poisoning with the nerve agent novichok. Mr Navalny is now said to be responding to speech at the hospital he is being treated at in Berlin. Doctors add that despite the improvement in Mr Navalny’s condition, the “long-term consequences
Saudi Arabia has given 20-year sentences to five people charged with the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, according to Al Arabiya news channel. A further three people have also been charged at Riyadh Criminal Court, receiving sentences ranging between seven and 10 years. The trial was criticised by rights groups and an independent UN investigator, who
India has surpassed Brazil to become the second-worst affected country in the world by the coronavirus pandemic. A total of 90,802 new cases have been registered overnight, taking the total number of cases to 4,204,613. It has taken just 13 days for India to go from three to four million cases, while it took Brazil
More than 100,000 people are thought to have taken part in a protest in Minsk against the president of Belarus – amid reports that masked “snatch squads” have been detaining some student demonstrators. Protesters were bundled into vans for taking part in fresh unsanctioned rallies against leader Alexander Lukashenko on the fourth weekend since his
Tourism across the world has been hit hard by COVID-19 but China has one key advantage – 1.4 billion people with nowhere else to go. Domestic flights are back to 2019 levels. Lockdown is long gone in China and people are keen to travel. But with the pandemic raging abroad, with many popular tourist destinations
The suspect in the Madeleine McCann case is being investigated over a separate child sex allegation a month before she vanished in Portugal. The German drifter known as Christian B is suspected of exposing himself and performing a sex act in front of a young girl on a beach in 2007. German prosecutor Hans-Christian Wolters,
Lionel Messi has said he is staying at Barcelona, saying he didn’t want to take the club where he has spent all of his career to court. The Argentinian forward, regarded by many as the best footballer of all time, had expressed a desire to leave the Spanish club in recent days. Messi, 33, has
Twenty-two schools have been shut down in France and the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion due to coronavirus as cases soar in the country. More than 12 million pupils returned to classrooms in France on Tuesday but some parents and teachers’ unions have expressed concern over the reopening of schools as the spread
Possible signs of life have been detected by Beirut rescue workers in the rubble of a building that collapsed after a huge explosion a month ago, a rescue worker said. A team with a rescue dog detected movement under a destroyed building in the Gemmayze area of the Lebanese capital, one of the worst hit
A senior German politician has called for a “European response” after “unequivocal evidence” found that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with the nerve agent novichok. Norbert Roettgen, who heads Germany’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, said it was necessary to “pursue hard politics” and “respond with the only language (President) Putin understands – that
Hospital tests have shown Putin critic Alexei Navalny was “without doubt” poisoned with a nerve agent from the novichok group, the German government has said. Tests performed on samples taken from the Russian opposition leader from his hospital bed in Berlin showed the presence of the Soviet-era agent, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert
Kaing Guek Eav, the man who admitted to overseeing the mass torture and killing of thousands of Cambodians as the head of the prison system for the Khmer Rouge, has died. Duch, as he was known. died in a Cambodian hospital on Wednesday morning after having difficulty breathing, according to a spokesperson. He had been
Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting at a rate which matches the worst-case scenario for sea level rises, according to a new study. The vast majority of the planet’s ice mass is contained in the Antarctic ice sheet, which would cause sea levels to rise by 58 metres if it melted completely. The