The US Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free-trade partner – despite it being a fictional country. A USDA spokesperson said the Kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by accident during a staff test.

The department’s online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys and dairy cows. In the Marvel universe, Wakanda is the fictional East African home country of superhero Black Panther. The fictional country was removed soon from the list after US media first queried it, prompting jokes that the countries had started a trade war.

Wakanda first appeared in the Fantastic Four comic in 1966, and made a reappearance when Black Panther was adapted into an Oscar-winning film last year.

The unusual listing was spotted by Francis Tseng, a New York-based software engineer who was looking up agricultural tariffs for a fellowship he was applying for.(BBC)…[+]

The Stabroek News is offering to publish, free of cost, the names of persons in public life who have thus far failed to file their declarations of assets and liabilities to the Integrity Commission. The offer was extended on Monday following a recent disclosure by Chairman of the Commission’s Board, Kumar Doraisami that the anti-corruption body lacks the requisite funds to publish the list. Doraisami, during an interview in September, had also said that the Commission lacks funding to prosecute defaulters.

The Integrity Commission Act was assented to in 1997. The Commission’s budget increased from $39 million in 2018 to $45 million in 2019, but Doraisami said that unexpected, urgent renovation work ate into the Commission’s budget, so that the funding which it has remaining is only sufficient to pay staff, rent, and utilities.(stabroeknews)…[+]

Italian prosecutors have accused Egyptian officials of deliberately trying to mislead the investigation into student Giulio Regeni’s death. Regeni, a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge, was doing research for his doctorate in Cairo when he went missing in January 2016.

His body was found nine days later. Prosecutors said Egypt’s claims about Regeni’s death had either been contradicted by a post-mortem examination in Italy, or debunked. Prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco was addressing the first session of a parliamentary commission set up to look into whether Regeni was the focus of scrutiny by security forces in Egypt before his death. The topic the 28-year-old Italian student was looking into – independent trade unions – is politically controversial within Egypt.(BBC)…[+]

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has responded to Donald Trump’s call for the top US court to stop impeachment. “The president is not a lawyer,” she told the BBC in an exclusive interview, adding: “He’s not law trained.” In a wide-ranging conversation, she also said poor women were victims of restrictive abortion access.

The US president is expected to be impeached by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. The House, controlled by the Democrats, accuses him of an abuse of power in his dealings with Ukraine. Impeachment is like an indictment – the charges will then be sent to the Republican-controlled Senate for a trial, where senators act like jurors. President Trump is expected to be acquitted there of the two charges he faces.

Earlier this month, the president suggested in a tweet that the Supreme Court could step in. “Radical Left has NO CASE. Read the Transcripts. Shouldn’t even be allowed. Can we go to Supreme Court to stop?” When the BBC’s Razia Iqbal asked the justice what her reading of the constitution was in this context, she replied: “The president is not a lawyer, he’s not law trained.”

Ms Ginsburg was talking to the BBC at an event where she was awarded the Berggruen Prize for philosophy and culture, which is awarded annually to someone whose ideas “have profoundly shaped human understanding and advancement”.(BBC)…[+]

Twelve persons including several children were displaced yesterday morning after a fire of unknown origin gutted their Plaisance, East Coast Demerara house. Stabroek News understands that the fire started around 10.20 am at Lot 1 Graham Street, Plaisance, ECD. Shaya Quamina and her three children occupied the upper flat of the house while construction worker Carl James, his wife Junan Holland and their six children lived in the lower flat.(stabroeknews)…[+]

President Trump has said he does not consider the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 to be a genocide, contradicting a unanimous vote by the US Senate. The historic vote last week incensed Turkey, which has always denied that the killings amounted to a genocide.

Turkey’s foreign ministry on Friday summoned the US ambassador to express its anger over the vote, accusing the US of “politicising history”. Armenia says 1.5 million were killed in an effort to wipe out the ethnic group. The killings took place in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, the forerunner of modern-day Turkey.

In the wake of two votes last week in the US House and Senate to recognise the massacres as genocide – a long-awaited symbolic victory for Armenians – Turkey’s authoritarian president Recip Tayyip Erdogan threatened to shut down Incirlik air base, which is based in Turkey and hosts US nuclear warheads. Mr Erdogan also said he could close Kurecik radar base as a threat of US sanctions hung over Turkey after its recent military offensive in Syria.(bbc)…[+]

Charlize Theron says she’s “not ashamed” to talk about the moment her mum shot and killed her dad in self-defence. The actress was 15 when her alcoholic dad shot through the door of the room where she was hiding with her mum. “None of those bullets ever hit us, which is just a miracle. But in self-defence, she ended the threat,” she told NPR.

She added: “The more we talk about these things, the more we realise we are not alone in any of it.” Charlize grew up on on a farm near Johannesburg in South Africa with her mum Gerda and dad Charles. She described her dad as a “very sick man” and said living with an alcoholic was a “pretty hopeless situation”.

“The day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life, more than just this one event of what happened one night,” she said. Speaking about what happened, she said her dad was so drunk he “shouldn’t have been able to walk when he came into the house with a gun”. “My mom and I were in my bedroom leaning against the door, because he was trying to push through the door. “So both of us were leaning against the door from the inside to have him not be able to push through.(BBC)…[+]

Troubled airline Fly Jamaica is seeking protection from creditors as it tries to restructure and stay in business or explore other options, such as a sale. That filing for bankruptcy protection with the Office of Insolvency was done on October 29, according to Marlon Murdock, the agent for Fly Jamaica trustee Wilfred Baghaloo.

It follows the unravelling of a nascent deal over the summer with a group of investors seeking to acquire the airline from founder Paul Reece. Murdock told the Financial Gleaner that Fly Jamaica is preparing a proposal for creditors to vote on, which was preceded by a ‘Notice of Intention’ in the press.

“The process now is that since Fly Jamaica has filed a notice of intention, they had an initial 30 days to put together a proposal that they were going to present to creditors, who will then vote on it so that they can either accept or reject,” the agent said. ‘They’ve been given an extension for that initial 30 days so the new date will be January 14, 2020,” Murdock added. So far, Fly Jamaica has presented a list of 259 creditors, who are owed US$21.86 million ($2.9 billion).(Stabroeknews)…[+]

The Eritrean-American comedian Tiffany Haddish has celebrated her Bat Mitzvah.

The Jewish coming-of-age ceremony – normally marked when a girl turns 12 – signifies a stepping into religious maturity, and a commitment to keep the commandments of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible containing the foundations of Jewish law. It was held on the same day as both her 40th birthday and the release of her Netflix comedy special Black Mitzvah, in which she pays tribute to her Jewish heritage. Her journey reflects the experience of many black Jews who have either rediscovered their roots or felt a strong spiritual attraction to Judaism. Haddish first met her Eritrean Jewish father at the age of 27.(BBC)…[+]

Thieves have reportedly stolen £50m worth of jewellery from the Kensington home of Tamara Ecclestone. The daughter of ex Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, was left “shaken and angry” after the burglary on Friday. According to The Sun, rings and earrings, a Cartier bangle worth £80,000, which was given to the heiress as a wedding present, were all taken in the raid. The Met Police said no arrests had been made. A spokesman for Ecclestone said: “I can sadly confirm there has been a home invasion. Internal security are co-operating with police in this matter.

“Tamara and family are well but obviously angry and shaken by the incident.” The Met said officers were called to the home in Palace Green, Kensington, shortly after 23:00 GMT. “It was reported that an amount of high value jewellery had been stolen,” a spokesman added. Eccleston bought the 55-room Kensington home in 2011 for £45m, according to Forbes magazine. The 35-year-old also spent millions renovating the property to include an “Amazonian crystal bathtub, a private nightclub, a bowling alley, a subterranean swimming pool, a beauty salon, a dog spa and a car lift”.(BBC)…[+]