The Klondike region of Canada is famous for its gold, but now other remarkable ancient treasures have been unearthed from the melting permafrost. Two mummified ice age mammals – a wolf pup and a caribou calf – were discovered by gold miners in the area in 2016 and unveiled on Thursday at a ceremony in Dawson in Yukon territory.

It is extremely rare for fur, skin and muscle tissues to be preserved in the fossil record, but all three are present on these specimens, which have been radiocarbon-dated to more than 50,000 years old. The wolf pup is preserved in its entirety, including exceptional details of the head, tail, paws, skin and hair. The caribou calf is partially preserved, with head, torso and two front limbs intact.

“To our knowledge, this is the only mummified ice age wolf ever found in the world,” said Grant Zazula, a local palaeontologist working with the Yukon government, who also emphasised the support of the local gold miners and mining community for palaeontology research. Julie Meachen, a carnivore morphologist who works with ice age mammals at Des Moines University and will soon be doing research on the wolf pup, said: “When Grant sent me the pictures and asked me to participate I was really, really excited. I was sort of beside myself.(theguardian)…[+]

The Dutch government expelled two alleged Russian spies this year after they were accused of planning to hack into a Swiss chemicals laboratory where novichok nerve agent samples from the Salisbury attack were analysed, it has emerged. The men were arrested in The Hague this spring as part of an operation involving British, Swiss and Dutch intelligence agencies.

The Swiss daily newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reported that the men were carrying equipment that could be used to break into the Spiez laboratory’s IT network when they were seized. Isabelle Graber, the head of communications at the Swiss intelligence service, the FIS, said in a statement issued to the Guardian: “The Swiss authorities are aware of the case of Russian spies discovered in The Hague and expelled from the same place.

“The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) participated actively in this operation together with its Dutch and British partners. The FIS has thus contributed to the prevention of illegal actions against a critical Swiss infrastructure.”(theguardian)…[+]

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has formally recognised that the French state was responsible for the death of a dissident mathematician in Algeria in 1957, admitting for the first time the French military’s “system” of torture during Algeria’s independence war.

Macron paid a visit on Thursday to the widow of Maurice Audin, a French communist mathematician and anti-colonial activist. Audin was arrested in 1957 by the French military during the battle of Algiers. His body has never been recovered. Macron told the widow: “The only thing I am doing is to acknowledge the truth.” Audin has become the symbol of France’s abuses during the war in its former colony in the 1950s and 1960s. Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, had acknowledged Audin didn’t escape – contrary to the official version – but died in jail.(theguardian)…[+]

Yemen’s humanitarian situation has worsened rapidly since UN peace talks collapsed and fighting resumed in the port city of Hodeida, where hundreds of thousands of lives hang in the balance, the top UN aid official in the country has said. “The situation has deteriorated dramatically in the past few days. Families are absolutely terrified by the bombardment, shelling and airstrikes,” the UN humanitarian coordinator Lise Grande said in a statement.

On Thursday, the Saudi-led military coalition attacking Houthi rebels seized the main road into the strategic port city of Hodeida, weakening Houthi control over the supply of humanitarian aid into the country.“The mills in Hodeida feed millions of people,” Grande said. “We’re particularly worried about the Red Sea mill, which currently has 45,000 metric tonnes of food inside, enough to feed 3.5 million people for a month. If the mills are damaged or disrupted, the human cost will be incalculable,” she said.(theguardian)…[+]

Donald Trump has falsely claimed that 3,000 people did not die in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria, and said the number was made up by the Democratic party “to make me look as bad as possible”. Despite significant evidence showing nearly 3,000 people were killed in the devastating storm last year, Trump tweeted that the official death toll was a political scheme, two days after he was sharply criticised for saying the government had an “unsung success” in its response to Maria.

Puerto Rico’s government raised the official death toll from 64 people to 2,975 late last month following the publication of new research by the publication of new research by George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health.Though the official death toll was changed in August, reports by other academic institutions and newspapers estimated the death toll was in the thousands as early as December 2017. But Trump contested these findings on Thursday.(theguardian)…[+]

US –  Viola Davis has expressed regret about her role in 2011 film The Help, apparently concurring with critics of its “white saviour” narrative. Davis played Aibileen Clark, one of two black maids in 1963 Mississippi whose stories are told by a young white woman (Emma Stone) in a book exposing the everyday racism they face.

In an interview with the New York Times, Davis cited The Help as a role she regretted. “I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of the maids that were heard,” she said. “I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know that if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”

Davis qualified her criticism by saying that the experience of making the film in terms of friendships and collaborators was extremely positive. In the same interview, Davis spoke of the “responsibility of feeling like I am the great black female hope for women of colour”, describing it as “a real professional challenge”.(The Guardian)…[+]

GERMANY –  Angela Merkel has condemned the outbreak of far-right protests in eastern Germany, telling the Bundestag in an unusually passionate address that shouting Nazi slogans and committing acts of violence are inexcusable.

The German chancellor was heckled during a lively Bundestag debate by the head of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party (AfD), Alexander Gauland, who accused her of dividing Germany with her immigration policy, endangering peace and spreading fake news by supporting controversial evidence that far-right protesters were hounding foreigners through the streets. In response, Merkel told Gauland that while she acknowledged the anger felt after the death of a man in Chemnitz who was allegedly stabbed by two asylum seekers, “there is no excuse or explanation for rabble-rousing, in some cases the use of violence, Nazi slogans, hostility towards people who look different, to the owner of a Jewish restaurant, attacking police”.

Merkel also responded to the row gripping Germany over Hans-Georg Maaßen, the head of the BfV domestic intelligence agency, who questioned the use of the word “Hetzjagd” meaning hunting by Merkel’s spokesman to describe what happened to foreign people in Chemnitz.(The Guardian)…[+]

ITALY –  Thousands of migrants risk dying at sea because of a clampdown on NGO rescue ships, aid agencies have warned, in what has been the longest period of their absence in the central Mediterranean since they began operating in late 2015.

Since 26 August, no NGO rescue vessel has operated on the main migration routes between north Africa and southern Europe. Anti-immigration policies by the Maltese and Italian governments, which have closed their ports to the vessels, have driven the sharp decrease in rescue missions. People seeking asylum are still attempting the risky crossing. The last time the Mediterranean was without NGO rescue boats was from 28 June to 8 July 2018, and in those days more than 300 migrants died at sea.

The death toll has fallen in the past year, but the number of those drowning as a proportion of arrivals in Italy has risen sharply in the past few months, with a possibility of dying during the crossing now three times higher. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2,383 migrants died as a result of shipwreck in 2017, compared with 100,308 arrivals to Italy. In 2018, with NGO boats under pressure from Maltese and Italian authorities, the number of victims has already reached 1,130, compared with just 20,319 who have landed in the country.

Of the 10 NGO rescue boats that were operating in the Mediterranean, three are being detained at the port of Valletta, Malta, in a dispute over flag registration. Vessels operated by the Open Arms NGO, meanwhile, left the central Mediterranean last month because of the closure of the Italian ports, with no date set for their return. (The Guardian)…[+]

SAUDI ARABIA – Saudi authorities have arrested an Arab man who appeared in video having breakfast with a female work colleague.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Development said the man was arrested for appearing in an “offensive video” and cited violations of rules including those “regulating women’s placement at work.” Local news platform SaudiNews50 said yesterday that the woman was arrested as well. CNN couldn’t confirm her arrest. Authorities did not reveal their nationalities. The man speaks in an Egyptian dialect in the video and it was not clear if the woman was Saudi.

“The labor ministry arrested an expatriate in Jeddah after he appeared in an offensive video,” said the ministry’s statement, which was published on Sunday. Local media identified the man as Egyptian, saying that the video was shot in the lobby of the hotel where both the man and woman work.(CNN)…[+]

INDIA – To check Instagram at home, Laveena must stand on the edge of her terrace, arm outstretched, hoping the signal is strong enough for her phone to blink to life.

A few times a day, she grudgingly shares her phone with her little brother, so he can speak to his friends on the WhatsApp account they share. Like most Indians, the university student from Jaipur, in Rajasthan state, frequently runs out of storage on her phone. As Laveena explains these challenges, a team from Google is sitting in her living room scribbling notes. To the world’s largest technology companies, the digital habits of a 22-year old Indian woman matter more than ever.

With the mobile market in developed economies nearing saturation point, technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon are turning to large and fast-growing markets in Asia and Africa. India is especially prized, simultaneously home to the second-largest number of smartphones in the world more than 330m in circulation and the world’s largest offline population: more than 1 billion people in 2016, according to the World Bank.(The Guardian)…[+]