Sweden’s government has sought urgent assurances on data security from national agencies including the health, education and pensions services after a huge leak of private and sensitive information that has cost two ministers their jobs. Amid reports by the Dagens Nyheter newspaper that confidential medical details were being handled by unscreened IT workers in Romania, the national broadcaster SVT said data outsourcing arrangements at six state agencies were being checked.

The checks follow a cabinet reshuffle last week in which interior minister Anders Ygeman and infrastructure minister Anna Johansson both stepped down after what the prime minister, Stefan Löfven, called an “extremely serious” security breach.

Several ministers had known about the breach, which followed a botched 2015 data outsourcing contract between the national transport agency and IBM Sweden, for at least 18 months but failed to inform the prime minister, media reported.The former head of the agency, Maria Ågren, was fired in January and fined after security police found she had waived security clearance requirements for foreign IT workers when signing the agreement, in breach of privacy and data protection laws.(theguardian)…[+]

Venezuela opposition leaders Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma have been taken from their homes, where they were under house arrest, family members of the two have tweeted. López’s wife and Ledezma’s daughter said they would hold President Nicolás Maduro responsible for the fate of the two men.

Both leaders in recent days have called on Venezuelans to join protests against Maduro over the creation of an all-powerful legislative body called the constituent assembly, which was elected on Sunday.  The vote for the assembly was boycotted by the opposition and has been criticised around the world as an assault on democratic freedoms.12:27 in the morning: the moment when the dictatorship kidnaps Leopoldo at my house,” López’s wife, Lilian Tintori, wrote on Twitter. Sanctions freeze Venezuelan president’s assets under US jurisdiction and prevent US citizens from doing business with him.(theguardian)…[+]

Pakistan must detach itself from American influence and pull out of the “war on terror” in order to create prosperity and achieve regional peace, Imran Khan, the Pakistani opposition leader , has said. Buoyed by last week’s dismissal of prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Khan is eyeing Pakistan’s highest political office, and said he was ready to change the country’s international relations. “Sadly, our ruling elite took dollars from the Americans and went into this war,” Khan told the Guardian. “It has created such hatred in our society. It has created turmoil.” His comments come as the US considers how to approach the conflict in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The White House recently announced it was withholding $50m (£38m) in military aid to Pakistan for its failure to crack down on jihadi groups. However, if it were up to Khan, Pakistan would reject US aid entirely. “Aid cripples the country,” he said. “It enslaves the country. You are dictated decisions from abroad. I’m completely against this.”(theguardian)…[+]

A surge in the number of seizures of child-like sex dolls by border officers has led investigators to identify dozens of previously unknown suspected paedophiles. The lifelike silicone dolls, which weigh around 25kg (55lb) and can cost thousands of pounds, are being imported to the UK after being sold by traders on sites including Amazon and eBay, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said. They are a “relatively new phenomenon” in the UK and should be criminalised, said Hazel Stewart, the operations manager at the NCA’s child exploitation and online protection command (Ceop). Border Force officers have seized 123 such dolls in little more than a year since March 2016; seven people have been charged with importing them, including one man who was jailed last month.

The figures were revealed as a judge at Canterbury crown court dismissed an attempt by a barrister representing an ex-primary school governor, David Turner, to argue that a doll he imported was not obscene. Turner, a 72-year-old former churchwarden, pleaded guilty on Monday to importing the child sex doll after the application to dismiss the charge was turned down. Of the seven men charged, six also faced allegations linked to child abuse images. Dan Scully, the deputy director for intelligence operations at the Border Force, said this showed that people who ordered the models, which are primarily manufactured in China and Hong Kong, often committed sex crimes.(theguardian)…[+]

The former head of the US government ethics watchdog has warned that Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest put the country at risk of being seen as a “kleptocracy”.

Speaking to the Guardian, Walter Shaub, who quit this month as director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), condemned the president for using his hotels and other properties for government business in what is in effect a free advertising campaign. “His actions create the appearance of profiting from the presidency, and the appearance here is everything, because the demand I’m making is so much more than ‘have a clean heart’. It’s: ‘Have a clean heart and act appropriately,’” Shaub said.

“The fact that we’re having to ask questions about whether he’s intentionally using the presidency for profit is bad enough, because the appearance itself undermines confidence in government.” He added: “It certainly risks people starting to refer to us as a kleptocracy. That’s a term people throw around fairly freely when they’re talking about Russia, fairly or unfairly, and we run the risk of getting branded the same way. America really should stand for more than that.”(theguardian)…[+]

Four thousand relatives of soldiers who fought in the battle of Passchendaele, which started 100 years ago on Monday, have joined Prince Charles, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Theresa May at Tyne Cot cemetery in Flanders to remember one of the bloodiest chapters in the first world war.

A majority of the 11,961 servicemen buried in the Commonwealth war grave were killed during the 100-day offensive to take the village of Passchendaele, also known as the third battle of Ypres. Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth war graveyard, lies on a former German machine gun position between Passchendaele, on high ground to the west, and the Belgian town of Ypres, visible from the cemetery a few miles away.The service will include readings of wartime poems, the diaries and letters of those who fell, including a German officer, and music from the national youth choir of Scotland, the band of the HM Royal Marines Plymouth, the Welsh Guards and the central band of the Royal Air Force, among others.(theguardian)…[+]

A 34-year-old man opened fire in a nightclub in the southern German city of Konstanz on Sunday, killing one person and seriously injuring three others, police have said.

The gunman was fatally wounded in a gunfight with police officers outside the music venue after they had rushed to the scene shortly after the incident at about 3.30am BST. He died later in hospital. The motive for the shooting was unclear. One police officer was also injured in the exchange of fire. The gunman was an Iraqi citizen who had lived in the country for a long time and was not an asylum seeker, a German police spokesman told broadcaster N-TV.

Fritz Bezikofer said police had ruled out terrorism, adding: “The motives of the man who acted alone are unclear. We are still investigating but the circumstances surrounding the events at the disco in the evening before the shooting are a bit clearer and this led us to rule out a terrorism background.”  A witness told local media he saw an attacker with a machine gun, adding: “The club was packed. I would guess there were more than 100 people inside.” The shooting came after a man killed one person and injured six others in the northern city of Hamburg on Friday. Officials said he was an Islamist known to security forces and had mental health issues.(theguardian)…[+]

EasyJet is “urgently” seeking answers after a worker at Nice airport apparently punched one of the airline’s passengers who was holding his baby at the terminal after a 13-hour delay. A photo circulating online appears to show the man, believed to be a special assistance provider at the airport in south-east France, attacking the man in front of other passengers on Saturday. A fellow passenger said the man was struck after families had been held up because of delayed flight EZY2122 from Nice to Luton, with little access to information or space to sit down.Arabella Arkwright, who took the photograph, said the man was holding his baby while his wife vented their frustration to airport staff about the lack of baby food and seats.(theguardian)…[+]

More than a dozen people gathered behind the podium, some clutching framed photos of loved ones. For years they had called for justice and demanded change, amid estimates that as many as 4,000 indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada in recent decades. Their determination crystalised into federal action last August, when the Liberal government launched a two-year, C$53.8m inquiry aimed at bringing an end to what it called an “ongoing national tragedy”. But nearly one year later, this Manitoba coalition – made up of those who had last family and friends – had come together again to demand change.We have lost confidence in the national inquiry,” Hilda Anderson-Pryz, whose sister Dawn died under mysterious circumstances in 2011, told reporters. “We’re being left out and not being heard by the national inquiry. We all agree that we cannot dishonour our loved ones and ourselves by participating in a flawed process.” The declaration came after months of red flags, they said. The inquiry sparked anger early on when it was revealed that policing would be omitted from the terms of reference, despite longstanding complaints of police failure to protect indigenous women equally.(theguardian)…[+]

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and UN Women have signed an agreement to support a common approach to measuring Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in the Caribbean. Although GBV, in particular violence against women and girls, affects much of the Region, many countries do not generate or have access to comprehensive data on the frequency, nature and response to this issue.

The agreement was signed today at CDB’s headquarters in Barbados. It makes provisions for both agencies to work together to close the data gap, ensuring regional policy measures are put in place to address the problem more effectively. “This agreement aims to support the CARICOM Secretariat in building regional knowledge transfer and sustainability in systematic collection, analysis and dissemination of comparable prevalence data on GBV in the Caribbean. This intervention is part of a broader project in which CDB and UN Women will cooperate in the production of data on gender-based violence in the Region and the building of regional capacities in this regard,” said Monica La Bennett, Acting Vice-President (Operations) at CDB, who signed on behalf of the Bank.

CDB and UN Women will work in tandem to support the deepening of the CARICOM region’s expertise in data collection and analysis on GBV, through the implementation and formal adoption of the CARICOM Model. The CARICOM survey model collects data on the frequency of GBV against women, and also highlights the consequences for women, their children and families, and risk and protective factors for violence. This information can directly inform service provision and prevention strategies.(CDB)…[+]