A reunion of kidnapped daughters and their parents in Jangebe, Nigeria, turned violent on Wednesday when armed forces reportedly opened fire. At least three people were reportedly shot at the official handover ceremony. It is unclear if there were any deaths. Parents were said to have become frustrated at how long the ceremony was taking and started throwing stones at government officials. The 279 girls were kidnapped by armed men while at school last Friday. They were then freed on Tuesday. They were kept in the custody of the Zamfara state government, and given medical treatment in the state capital Gusau, before Wednesday’s official handover ceremony. UN experts have called for the traumatised pupils to receive urgent rehabilitation. One mother at the reunion told AFP news agency that parents became angry at the length of the reunion because they wanted to get back home before dark, as the roads were unsafe. The Zamfara state government has imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Jangebe in response to the shootings. Authorities also demanded that all market activities in the town stop until further notice, claiming that they had found evidence that such activities were helping criminals operate in the area.(BBC)…[+]

A man has injured eight people, three seriously, in a stabbing attack in a south Swedish town which police are treating as suspected terrorism. The assailant, who is in his twenties, struck in five different locations in the centre of Vetlanda around 15:00 (14:00 GMT), police say. Within minutes he was shot and wounded by police, and is now in custody. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven said the “horrific violence” was a reminder of “how frail our safe existence is”.  Five different crime scenes, a few hundred metres apart, were identified, local police chief Jonas Lindell said. One eyewitness, florist Asa Karlqvist, told local newspaper Vetlanda-Posten: “We heard a scream from the street. Then we saw a man enter the store, shouting that he had been stabbed. “Blood was pouring from his shoulder, so we got towels and applied pressure on the wound.“(BBC)…[+]

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has opened a formal investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories. Fatou Bensouda said the probe would cover events in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip since June 2014. Last month, the Hague-based court ruled that it could exercise its criminal jurisdiction over the territories. Israel rejected Ms Bensouda’s decision, while Palestinian officials praised it. The US expressed disappointment and opposition to the move. The ICC has the authority to prosecute those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes on the territory of states party to the Rome Statute, its founding treaty. Israel has never ratified the Rome Statute, but the court ruled that it had jurisdiction because the United Nations secretary general accepted the Palestinians’ accession to the treaty in 2015. Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war. Palestinians claim the territories for a future independent state.(BBC)…[+]

A Canadian man who killed 10 people by ploughing a van into pedestrians in Toronto has been found guilty on all 26 charges related to the 2018 attack. Alek Minassian had admitted the attack, but his lawyers argued he was not criminally responsible due to his autism spectrum disorder.  Justice Anne Malloy has dismissed this claim, saying the attack was the “act of a reasoning mind”. Minassian faced 10 charges of murder and 16 charges of attempted murder. Throughout the ruling, Justice Malloy refused to name the attacker, 28, referring to him instead as John Doe, and said she would not give him the notoriety “he sought from the start”. Ms Malloy accepted his diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but ruled that he was capable of understanding his actions on April 2018 were both legally and morally wrong. At trial, defence lawyer Boris Bytensky said ASD had left his client without the ability to develop empathy, saying in closing arguments the attacker had no conception of the damage his actions caused. On Wednesday, Justice Malloy rejected this line of argument. “Lack of empathy for the suffering of victims, even an incapacity to empathise for whatever reason, does not constitute a defence,” she said.(BBC)…[+]

Girls among the nearly 300 who were kidnapped from a school in north-western Nigeria have been describing their ordeal following their release. “Most of us got injured,” one of the schoolgirls told the BBC, adding that gunmen threatened to shoot them. The girls were abducted by unidentified assailants from their boarding school in Jangebe, Zamfara state, on Friday and taken to a forest, police said. The state’s governor said on Tuesday that the 279 girls had been freed. Such kidnappings are carried out for ransom and are common in the north of the country. On Tuesday, dozens of the girls were seen gathered at a government building in Zamfara after they were taken there in a fleet of mini-buses. Speaking to the BBC, one of the schoolgirls said that some of those kidnapped had found it difficult to continue walking when instructed to do so by the gunmen because of their injuries. “They said they [would] shoot anybody who did not continue to walk,” she said. “We walked across a river and they hid us and let us sleep under shrubs in a forest.” Another of the girls, aged 15, said that some of her classmates found it difficult “walking in the stones and thorns” and had to be carried.(BBC)…[+]

A painting by former British prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, which was owned by Angelina Jolie, has sold for £7m at auction in London. The sale price was almost four times the top pre-sale estimate and beat the previous record for a Churchill painting, which was just under £1.8m. The Tower Of The Koutoubia Mosque, painted in Marrakesh during World War Two, was sold to an anonymous buyer. A Christie’s spokesperson called it “Churchill’s most important work”. “Aside from its distinguished provenance, it is the only landscape he made during the war,” the spokesperson added. Churchill, a keen artist, took inspiration from the Moroccan city and painted The Tower Of The Koutoubia Mosque oil work following the Casablanca Conference in 1943. He went on to give the finished piece to fellow wartime leader, US president Franklin Roosevelt.(BBC)…[+]

The number of US homegrown terror cases has risen sharply, the FBI boss has said, as he warned that the deadly January Capitol riot may serve as ‘inspiration’ for extremists.  Some 2,000 FBI domestic terror probes are open, up from 1,400 at the end of 2020, Director Christopher Wray said. Arrests of “racially motivated violent extremists,” including white supremacists, have tripled since 2017. For the first time, Mr Wray called the Capitol siege “domestic terrorism”. The attack could be “inspiration to a number of terrorist extremists,” he told a Senate hearing on Tuesday. Over 260 people have been arrested in connection with the storming of the US Capitol to date. In his first public testimony since the 6 January Capitol attack, Mr Wray warned that accepting such behaviour “would make a mockery of our nation’s rule of law”. He noted extremists and “bad actors” were mobilising online, using encrypted messaging platforms to evade authorities.(BBC)…[+]

A couple found camping “in a perilous position” on top of a cliff have been fined for breaching lockdown rules. The pair were found with a child in a tent 85m (280ft) above the North Yorkshire coast in a spot prone to landslips. Police said the 27-year-old woman and 30-year-old man had travelled from Doncaster and Middlesbrough. Choosing to camp at the site at Port Mulgrave, near Staithes, had put all three lives at risk, officers said.

As the Love Island reality TV franchise launches in South Africa, the show has come under fire from viewers who say it fails to reflect the racial make-up of the majority-black nation. South African media say just two contestants are black, and two are coloured – the official term for mixed-race people in the country. The other six housemates are white. In all, 10 contestants are vying to win the series and take home 1 million rand ($66,200; £47,500). A spokesman said more contestants would be arriving in the next few days who would reflect South Africa’s diversity. The reality TV series, which began in the UK before spin-offs launched elsewhere in the world, sees a group of men and women living in a villa isolated from the outside world. They couple up and take part in challenges to win the support of the voting public and ultimately compete for the cash prize. Participants are catapulted into the limelight, and there has been criticism in recent years that Love Island has failed to adequately support contestants’ mental health, while black contestants have spoken out about experiencing racism.(BBC)…[+]

Passengers have complained of queues of up to seven hours long at Heathrow Airport’s border control. One passenger described a mother having to feed her baby on the floor, saying conditions were “not humane”. A union for border control workers said Covid security measures designed to reduce infections was leading to inadequate staffing. Heathrow Airport said the government needed to make sure there were enough staff to cope with demand. Alicia, 26, who did not want her surname used, was flying back from Vienna after attending a medical appointment for her leg. She told the BBC she began queuing to go through border control at 18:30 on Sunday evening, but did not get through until 01:30 on Monday.