Protests in Buenos Aires, Lindsey Vonn crashes at the Winter Olympics and Bad Bunny performs at Super Bowl LX – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images
Ghanaian guitarist, arranger, singer-songwriter and cult hero who rose to fame outside Africa only late in life
Ebo Taylor, who has died aged 90, was one of the great innovators of west African music, a Ghanaian guitarist, arranger and singer-songwriter who never received the fame he deserved outside Africa until late in life, by when he had become a much-sampled cult hero. It was only in 2010, when he was 74, that he released Love and Death, his first solo album to be given an international distribution.
Recorded with members of the Berlin-based Afrobeat academy, it included new versions of songs from earlier in his career that until now had been heard only on imports or compilations. And it showed how – like his far more celebrated Nigerian friend Fela Kuti – he had fused African and western styles to create a style of his own.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Samir Hussein/Getty Images
© Photograph: Samir Hussein/Getty Images
© Photograph: Samir Hussein/Getty Images
USS Gerald R Ford will take about three weeks to sail to region, amid push for Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions
Donald Trump has ordered the world’s largest aircraft carrier to sail from the Caribbean Sea to the Middle East in an effort to increase pressure on Iran amid discussions over curbing its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
The USS Gerald R Ford and its supporting warships should take about three weeks to return to the region, where they will join the USS Abraham Lincoln, dramatically increasing the military firepower available to the US leader.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ridge Leoni/AP
© Photograph: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ridge Leoni/AP
© Photograph: Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Ridge Leoni/AP
Annexe holding 6,000 women and children is now mostly empty, raising security and humanitarian concerns
Most of the foreign families of suspected Islamic State fighters have left al-Hawl camp since the Syrian government took control of the facility, prompting security and humanitarian concerns over their whereabouts.
About 6,000 women and children from 42 different countries were previously held in the foreigners’ annexe of al-Hawl camp in north-east Syria, which housed some of the most radical former members of the extremist group. The foreigners’ annexe was separate from the part of the camp that contained about 20,000 Syrians and Iraqis.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Abdulmonam Eassa/Getty Images
© Photograph: Abdulmonam Eassa/Getty Images
© Photograph: Abdulmonam Eassa/Getty Images
Ex-PM’s thinktank urges more drilling and fewer renewables, ignoring evidence that clean energy is cheaper and better for bills
A thinktank with close ties to Saudi Arabia and substantial funding from a Donald Trump ally needs to present a particularly robust analysis to earn the right to be listened to on the climate crisis. On that measure, Tony Blair’s latest report fails on almost every point.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) received money from the Saudi government, has advised the United Arab Emirates petrostate, and counts as a main donor Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, friend of Trump and advocate of AI.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
© Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
Union urges Leonard Blavatnik to scrap Channel 13 deal, saying it is part of Netanyahu plan ‘to capture the media’
Israeli journalists have appealed to a British billionaire not to proceed with the sale of a stake in an Israeli television channel, which they warn would represent a severe blow to the independence of the country’s media.
Sir Leonard Blavatnik, listed by the Sunday Times as the UK’s third richest person, is selling a nearly 15% share in Channel 13, a commercial channel that has run critical news coverage of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in recent years, including investigations into the prime minister’s financial dealings.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
A campaign of ethnic cleansing and ‘tectonic’ new legal measures are killing the two-state solution to which other governments pay lip service
Protecting archaeological sites. Preventing water theft. The streamlining of land purchases. If anyone doubted the real purpose of the motley collection of new administrative and enforcement measures for the illegally occupied West Bank, Israel’s defence minister spelt it out: “We will continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state,” Israel Katz said in a joint statement with the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
While the world’s attention was fixed upon the annihilation in Gaza, settlers in the West Bank intensified their campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 2023; a fifth of them were children. Many more have been driven from their homes by relentless harassment and the destruction of infrastructure, with entire Palestinian communities erased across vast swathes of land.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
© Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times
Image Source: X[/caption]
© Arlette Bashizi for The New York Times
© Smith Collection/Gado, via Getty Images
© Gulshan Khan for The New York Times
© Andri Tambunan for The New York Times
Law enforcement across 19 African countries arrested 574 suspects and recovered approximately $3 million in a month-long cybercrime crackdown, dubbed Operation Sentinel. The operation primarily targeted three forms of cybercrimes - business email compromise schemes, digital extortion, and ransomware attacks.
Interpol, who coordinated the logistics of this operation revealed that these operations costed Africans financial losses that exceeded $21 million.
The initiative conducted between October 27 and November 27, also resulted in over 6,000 malicious links being taken down and six distinct ransomware variants decrypted as authorities dismantled their fraud networks exploiting critical sectors including finance and energy.
These three forms of cybercrimes are also identified as "growing threats" in INTERPOL's 2025 Africa Cyber Threat Assessment Report, demonstrating the accelerating scale of cyberattacks across the continent.
In Senegal, a major petroleum company detected a business email compromise scheme where fraudsters infiltrated internal email systems and impersonated executives to authorize a fraudulent wire transfer of $7.9 million. Senegalese authorities urgently froze destination accounts, successfully halting the transfer before funds could be withdrawn.
A Ghanaian financial institution suffered a ransomware attack that encrypted 100 terabytes of data and stole approximately $120,000, disrupting critical services. Ghanaian authorities conducted advanced malware analysis, identifying the ransomware strain and developing a decryption tool that recovered nearly 30 terabytes of data. Multiple suspects were arrested.
Ghanaian authorities also dismantled a major cyber-fraud network operating across Ghana and Nigeria that defrauded more than 200 victims of over $400,000. Using professionally designed websites and mobile apps, scammers mimicked well-known fast-food brands, collecting payments but never delivering orders. Ten suspects were arrested with over 100 digital devices seized and 30 fraudulent servers taken offline.
In Benin, 43 malicious domains were taken down and 4,318 social media accounts linked to extortion schemes and scams were shut down, leading to 106 arrests. Cameroonian law enforcement reacted quickly after two victims reported a scam involving an online vehicle sales platform, tracing the phishing campaign to a compromised server and issuing emergency bank freezes within hours.
"The scale and sophistication of cyberattacks across Africa are accelerating, especially against critical sectors like finance and energy," stated Neal Jetton, INTERPOL's Director of Cybercrime.
Login