Day: April 29, 2022

Last summer hundreds of thousands of people died when an unprepared India was hit by a catastrophic second wave of Covid-19 and its health care system buckled. Journalist Barkha Dutt, who was chronicling the pandemic, lost her father to the virus in April 2021. Here she writes on her loss, and other daughters who suffered … Read more

A driver crashed his car after breaking the Covid lockdown to “look at the snow”. Court documents released to the Local Democracy Reporting Service show Noel John drove from Merseyside to the Snake Pass on 15 January last year, when all of England was under restrictions. The 24-year-old, of Charles Street in St Helens, did not pay … Read more

Three men in Lancashire  who tried to extort up to £40,000 from victims in a “callous” blackmail plot have been jailed. Kamar Ilyas, 33, used a dating app to meet two married men while Aman Ullah Khan, 34, and Khalili Chaudry secretly filmed their sexual encounters. The trio, from Lancashire, admitted demanding cash from victims … Read more

Millions of children across Ukraine have had to flee their homes since the war there began. For some, it’s an even harder journey, because they don’t have their parents with them. One children’s home on the eastern front line had to move all of their children hundreds of miles across the country to keep them … Read more

Earlier this year Chinese programmer Jixian Wang moved to the Ukrainian port city of Odesa for work. Months later, Russia invaded the country. Mr Wang found that back home his friends and family were being told a different version of what was happening in Ukraine, by Chinese state media. He decided to start making videos … Read more

A British national has been killed in Ukraine and a second is missing, the UK Foreign Office has said. Sources in Ukraine told the BBC the dead man is Scott Sibley, who is understood to have been fighting for Ukrainian forces. He is the first British national confirmed to have been killed in the conflict … Read more

No one knows who put it here. But something rather odd has appeared in the center of St Petersburg. A bizarre art installation made up of one word: “ZAMESTIM” Each letter is the first letter of an international brand that has suspended operations in Russia. Their company logos are featured, too. Z is for Zara. … Read more

Labour MP Liam Byrne has been found to have bullied a former member of staff and will be suspended from the Commons for two days. The ex-Cabinet minister and MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill ostracised a former assistant after a minor office dispute, an investigation found. Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone said his behaviour was … Read more