As India’s raucous spring festival of Holi approached this year, a memo circulated among two women’s dormitories at the University of Delhi.“In the interests of the residents,” it said, undergraduate women would be locked inside the student halls from 9pm on Sunday until 6pm on Monday – well after most Indians had finished smearing each other in dye, dancing or drinking from cups of bhang lassi, a milky cannabis-based concoction.The decision of the hostels highlights a darker side to one of India’s most joyous festivals: as inhibitions decrease, many women say the street harassment endemic to Delhi life also surges.(The guardian)…[+]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s pledge to help Silicon Valley technology companies patch the bugs outlined in leaked CIA files has been met with skepticism from the security community. Assange said he would contact technology companies to privately supply technical details of the hacking techniques and security vulnerabilities that were redacted from the cache of classified documents released to the public. “We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out,” Assange said in a news conference streamed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has claimed diplomatic asylum since 2012.But members of the security community have dismissed Assange’s hyperbole around the CIA files – collectively nicknamed “Vault 7” – which he described as “exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective”.(the guardian)…[+]

Thousands of people who fled the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant six years ago have been told they must return to their homes or lose housing subsidies, despite lingering concerns over radiation in their former neighbourhoods.The instruction, condemned by campaigners as a violation of the evacuees’ right to live in a safe environment, will affect an estimated 27,000 people who were not living inside the mandatory evacuation zone imposed after Fukushima became the scene of the worst nuclear accident in Japanese history.The meltdown in three reactors occurred after a magnitude-9 earthquake on 11 March 2011 triggered a powerful tsunami that killed almost 19,000 people along Japan’s north-east coast and knocked out the plant’s backup cooling system.(the guardian)…[+]

Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has said he needs more rest and health tests after returning home from nearly two months of medical leave in Britain during which time his deputy has run the country.Shortly after arriving back from London, the 74-year-old former general told officials he was feeling much better but wanted to rest over the weekend, raising questions about his ability to run Africa’s biggest economy and most populous nation. The vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo, a lawyer who is seen as more business-friendly than Buhari, played an active role in driving policy changes in Africa’s top oil producer during the president’s seven-week absence. (The guardian)…[+]

The number of undocumented immigrants crossing into the United States from Mexico declined by 40% from January to February, Homeland Security secretary John Kelly said on Wednesday.The downturn came after Donald Trump took office on 20 January, vowing to deport many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.The flow of illegal border crossings as measured by apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons at the southern border dropped to 18,762 persons in February from 31,578 in January, Kelly said in a statement.He said the US Customs and Border Protection agency, which compiled the data, historically sees a 10% to 20% increase in apprehensions of immigrants from January to February.(the guardian)…[+]

One of the original “Schindler’s lists”, the documents used by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler to save more than 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, has been put up for sale. The document, commemorated in Thomas Keneally’s Booker prize-winning novel, was among those drawn up to protect Jewish workers from deportation and death. It is expected to make more than $2.4m.It is one of only seven, and was compiled with help from Schindler’s accountant Itzhak Stern, who was portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film of the story. For sale through the Moments in Time auction house, which specialises in rare documents, the 14-page document is the penultimate list and is dated 18 April 1945. It lists 801 male Jews at Schindler’s factory in occupied Czechoslovakia, who had been transported from the Nazi concentration camp at Plaszòw in German-occupied Poland.(the guardian)…[+]

Hawaii has become the first state to file a lawsuit against Donald Trump’s revised travel ban, saying the order will harm its Muslim population, tourism and foreign students.Attorneys for the state filed the lawsuit against the US government on Wednesday in the federal court in Honolulu. The state had sued over Trump’s initial travel ban, but that lawsuit was put on hold while other cases played out across the country.Trump’s new executive order, signed on Monday, bars new visas for people from six Muslim-majority countries and replaces an initial order issued on 27 January, which was chaotically rolled out and subsequently halted by a federal court following a barrage of legal challenges from states and advocate groups across the country.(the guardian)…[+]

In recent weeks, Benoît Hamon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have been ploughing their political furrows, criss-crossing France, addressing meetings and outlining their programmes for the presidency. But for the candidates of the Socialist party (PS) and hard-left movement La France insoumise (Unsubmissive France), the results have been distinctly underwhelming.Amid the travails of France’s mainstream right, whose candidate’s ever-deepening woes have been dominating media coverage, there has been little space left for the left. Both Mélenchon, a hard-left firebrand, and Hamon, a staunchly leftwing rebel outsider, are struggling to make their voices heard. (the guardian)…[+]

Some of Egypt’s major cities have been paralysed by rare protests in response to a cut in bread subsidies. The country’s ministry of supply reduced the state-sponsored provision of bread of up to 4,000 to 500 loaves per bakery, according to local news reports.

The move is designed to replace an earlier and more controversial proposal to cut the supply from five loaves per person per day to three. But while the cuts are unlikely to have a dramatic affect on the bread rations of the average citizen, the suggestion struck a nerve among the Egyptian public. In response to the decision, hundreds of Egypt’s poorest citizens filled the streets in the cities of Alexandria and Giza, and the towns of Kafr el-Sheikh and Minya. Roads were blocked and residents surrounded government buildings.(The guardian)…[+]

Apple has promised to “rapidly address” any security holes used by the CIA to hack iPhones, following the release of a huge tranche of documents covering the intelligence agency’s stockpile of software vulnerabilities.

The leak, dubbed “Vault 7” by its publisher WikiLeaks, is made up of a collection of around 10,000 individual documents created between 2014 and 2016. A spokesman for the CIA said it would not comment “on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents” and the Trump administration spokesman Sean Spicer also declined comment.Apple, one of numerous tech companies whose devices appear to have been targeted, released a statement late on Tuesday saying many of the vulnerabilities described by the documents were already fixed as of the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system, and aimed to reassure customers that it was working on patching the rest of the holes.(Telegraaf)…[+]