Covid: US opens up to fully vaccinated travellers
The US is easing its coronavirus travel restrictions, re-opening to passengers from the UK, EU and other nations.
From November, foreign travellers will be allowed to fly into the US if they are fully vaccinated and undergo testing and contact tracing, the White House said.
The US has had tough restrictions on travel in place since early last year.
The move on Monday answers a major demand from European allies at a time of strained relations.
Japan urges Europe to speak out against China’s military expansion
Exclusive: in the first piece in a new Guardian series on China and tensions in the Indo-Pacific, Japan’s defence minister says the international community must bolster deterrence efforts against Beijing’s military
Japan has urged European countries to speak out against China’s aggression, warning that the international community must bolster deterrence efforts against Beijing’s military and territorial expansion amid a growing risk of a hot conflict.
In an interview with the Guardian, Japan’s defence minister, Nobuo Kishi, said China had become increasingly powerful politically, economically and militarily and was “attempting to use its power to unilaterally change the status quo in the East and South China Seas”, which are crucial to global shipping and include waters and islands claimed by several other nations.
Tokyo had “strong concerns in regards to the safety and security of not only our own country and the region but for the global community”, Kishi warned. “China is strengthening its military power both in terms of quantity and quality, and rapidly improving its operational capability,” he said.
Welcome to the world’s most significant rewilding project, which could see the return of the woolly mammoth
In the far northeast of Russia, Evgeny Lebedev finds a bold experiment to restore land to how it was before the advent of civilised man
In the isolated wastes of northeastern Siberia can be witnessed not only the terrifying, deadly reality of climate change, with all its natural force, but also a solution so novel that it delves into the ancient history of this planet before the advent of civilised man.
This is a project that, one day, may see woolly mammoths once again roam the far north as part of an effort to help combat the most modern of all challenges.
The remote location where scientists are working on this most unlikely of solutions is on the bank of the Kolyma River, just outside the small town of Chersky. It is a place where in recent months, the weather has – as in so many other places around the world – gone haywire.
Russia: Several dead after university shooting in Siberia
Several students were also injured after an individual opened fire at Perm State National Research University in Siberia.
A gunman opened fire at a university in the Russian city of Perm on Monday morning, leaving six people dead and several wounded, Russia's Investigative Committee said.
The committee later said that 28 people were being treated after the attack.
The gunman was detained, Russia's Interior Ministry and a university spokesman said. Initially, authorities said that the gunman had been killed after the shooting, but later reported that he had been wounded and taken to a hospital.
Critics decry 'show trial' as 'Hotel Rwanda' inspiration Rusesabagina convicted on terror charges
A Rwandan court on Monday found Paul Rusesabagina guilty of belonging to a group linked to terrorism. The man who inspired the film “Hotel Rwanda” was sentenced to 25 years in prison in a trial that human rights watchdogs and other critics of Rwanda's repressive government have described as an act of political retaliation.
Rusesabagina, who is credited with saving ethnic Tutsis during Rwanda's 1994 genocide and was a recipient of the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, boycotted the announcement of the verdict, saying he didn’t expect justice in a trial he called a “sham”.
The US resident and Belgian citizen was convicted on nine charges, including the formation of an illegal armed group, membership in a terrorist group, financing a terror group, murder and abduction. He was charged along with 20 other people. Prosecutors had sought a life sentence.
The Texas checkpoint that forces migrants into dangerous terrain – and death
Just off US highway 281, south of a spit of a town called Encino in Brooks county, there’s a cross made of wind-strewn flowers tied to a utility pole marking the spot where 10 undocumented migrants were killed last month when the speeding van carrying them crashed. The makeshift shrine on a stretch of the highway deep in south Texas also contains some candles, a pair of work boots and a small Mexican flag. All mark what is suspected to be an extreme example of the collateral damage that results from securing our international borders. Law enforcement speculate that the inhabitants of the van were to be dropped off to traverse dangerous, snake-infested backcountry and circumvent a US Customs and Border Protection checkpoint located a few miles north of the accident site.
The immigration checkpoint is called the Falfurrias border patrol station, which leads out of the busiest of the immigration agency’s 20 sectors along both the Canadian and Mexican borders with the US. Its function is to interdict smugglers and drug traffickers. This landmark is at the center of Missing in Brooks County, a new documentary that details the growing number of deaths plaguing the nation’s border with Mexico and the logistical challenges in identifying even a single migrant among many hundreds who die annually.
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