WORLD

Sierra Leone’s opposition candidate, Julius Maada Bio, has rushed to take his presidential oath in a hotel after winning the run-off election. Mr Maada Bio is a former military ruler who briefly ruled the country in 1996. He narrowly beat ruling party candidate Samura Kamara, who has alleged irregularities and says he will challenge the outcome in court. Mr Maada ...

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will be imprisoned while he appeals his corruption conviction, the country’s Supreme Court has ruled. He is facing 12 years in jail on charges of accepting a bribe but had asked to remain free during his appeal. Lula claims the charges are politically motivated, and designed to prevent him from running for ...

Congolese opposition leader Moise Katumbi held Italian citizenship from October 2000 until January 2017, the Italian town where he was a resident said on Wednesday, jeopardising his hopes of contesting a presidential election later this year. Democratic Republic of Congo’s attorney general said last week he had opened an investigation into allegations about Katumbi’s Italian nationality, first reported by Paris-based ...

Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is to testify before the US House Commerce Committee regarding the firm’s use and protection of user data. Facebook has faced criticism after it emerged it had known for years that Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from about 50 million of its users. He will testify before the committee on Wednesday, 11 April. Committee chairman ...

Snapchat has launched a feature that enables up to 16 people to take part in a live chat together, using either video or just their voices. The app’s members can also start tagging each other by username, using the @ symbol in their posts. The changes will roll out over the coming weeks, the firm said. Snapchat came under fire ...

A company attempting to map people’s brains so their memories can be stored in computers has lost its link to one of the United States’ top universities. US start-up Nectome revealed its brain back-up plan last month, warning at the time that the process involved would be “100% fatal”. A number of neuroscientists subsequently poured scorn on the plan. The ...

An advert showing British Olympic diver Tom Daley using a smartphone at a swimming pool has been banned on the grounds that similar behaviour by consumers would damage the device. HTC has promoted the ad on social media since mid-2017. But an investigation by the UK’s advertising watchdog discovered that the device’s own instructions said the phone should not come ...

Spy kits that can track mobile phones and intercept calls and messages have been discovered in Washington and beyond, the US government has said. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says it has observed “anomalous activity” consistent with the use of so-called stingrays. They could be used by foreign spies or criminals, although the DHS said it did not know ...

President Yoweri Museveni has reportedly reached out to the head of the Catholic church in Uganda over reports that the latter is behind a plot to overthrow the government. State House said the president and the Archbishop of Kampala Catholic Archdiocese, Cyprian Kizito Lwanga, spoke over the phone on Monday and agreed on a way forward. The discussion followed the ...

A half century after Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s death, celebrities have been remembering him and reflecting on how much progress has been made in racial equality in the decades since his assassination. “The fact that I’m walking this carpet starring in a movie, that’s the impact he had on my life,” said Oscar-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson. “There has ...