Month: December 2019

China has responded with swift condemnation after the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly approved a bill targeting its mass crackdown on ethnic Muslim minorities. The bill decries what China describes as educational centers and the U.S. says are detention facilities. Chinese officials have expressed outrage after the House passed a bill late Tuesday condemning Beijing’s crackdown on…

John Kerry, the former secretary of state under Barack Obama who won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, has announced he is endorsing Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential primary race. “I’m not endorsing Joe because I’ve known him a long time. I’m endorsing him because I know him so well,” Kerry told the Washington…

Spotify’s annual Wrapped feature, which reveals users’ favourite music from the past year, has been released to its 243 million users, prompting mixed emotions among subscribers. The feature has become an anticipated event for regular users as it shows their most played songs, top artists, favourite genres and minutes listened for the year. But as…

A mural depicting police abuse in a Rio de Janeiro favela has been removed from the walls of a Miami events space after local police reportedly complained. The work, by the Brazilian artist Panmela Castro, showed a black woman being held in a headlock, with the caption: “Woman who filmed abused [sic] by police officers…

More than 800,000 people have marched in cities across France as railway workers, teachers and hospital staff held one of the biggest public sector strikes in decades against Emmanuel Macron’s plans to overhaul the pension system. A nationwide transport strike brought much of France to a standstill and was expected to continue for the next…

After a photo surfaced of West Virginia correction officer trainees giving what appears to be the Nazi salute, state officials quickly suspended some employees and the governor ordered the firing of those involved. The image, showing more than two dozen trainees with their arms raised and faces blurred, was released on Thursday by the West…

Her family called her Twinkle. In the dry desert brush of Rajasthan where her body was found, blood spattering her tiny legs and brown school uniform and a belt fastened around her neck, she lay among scattered toffee wrappers. Her family could barely utter the words to describe what happened to the six-year-old. “If you…

US prosecutors have charged two members of a Russia-based hacking group that calls itself Evil Corp with masterminding a global banking fraud scheme that netted the unsubtly named gang more than $100m. Two leading members of Evil Corp, Maksim Yakubets of Moscow and Igor Turashev from the Russian city Yoshkar-Ola, were charged with bank fraud…

R Kelly is facing new bribery charges apparently related to his 1994 marriage to the R&B singer Aaliyah, who was 15 at the time. A revised indictment in federal court in Brooklyn accuses Kelly of scheming with others to pay for a “fraudulent identification document” for someone identified only as “Jane Doe” on 30 August…

Two Muslim US congresswomen have been targeted by a vast international operation that exploits far-right pages on Facebook to inflame Islamophobia for profit, a Guardian investigation has found. A mysterious Israeli-based group uses 21 Facebook pages to churn out more than a thousand coordinated fake news posts per week to more than a million followers…