Protesters have attacked the Carrefour supermarket where Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas was killed by security guards

The brutal killing of a black man at the hands of two white security guards outside a supermarket has sparked outrage across Brazil.

The killing happened on Thursday, the eve of Black Consciousness Day, and spurred anti-racism protests on Friday.

Footage showed Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas, 40, being repeatedly punched in the face by the guards at a Carrefour store in Porto Alegre.

One of the guards, it has emerged, was an off-duty military police officer.

They were arrested, and the Brazilian subsidiary of the French supermarket group Carrefour said it had cut ties with the security firm that provided the guards.

Brazil has a long legacy of racism. It was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.

Brazilians have traditionally been taught that they live in a racial democracy – President Jair Bolsonaro denies racism exists – but activists say that perception is slowly changing.

Video of Thursday night’s attack in the southern city of Porto Alegre was circulated on social networks and on Brazilian media – sparking outrage.

It showed Mr Silveira Freitas, a welder, being repeatedly punched in the face and head by one security guard while being restrained by another. Another employee appeared to be alongside filming the incident.

Reports said security had been called after a female worker at the supermarket had been threatened by a man.

On Friday morning, protesters gathered outside the Carrefour in Porto Alegre and in the capital Brasilia, chanting and carrying signs which read “Ashamed of being white” and “Please stop killing us”. Protests were being called for in other cities.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which has gained momentum worldwide since the killing of George Floyd in the US in May, has resonated with many Brazilians.

In 2019, police in Brazil killed nearly six times as many people as in the US and most of them were black.

Many took to social media to condemn Thursday’s killing, including Brazil international footballer Richarlison Andrade.

“It seems that we have no way out… not even on Black Consciousness day,” the Everton player tweeted.

“In fact, what conscience? They killed a black man, beaten in front of the cameras. They beat him and filmed. Decency and shame have been lost to violence and hatred

A rocket attack on the Afghan capital Kabul has killed at least eight people and wounded 30 others, officials say, just before scheduled US-Taliban talks.

About 20 mortars were fired from two cars into residential areas on Saturday morning, the interior ministry said.

Several buildings and vehicles were damaged. The Taliban denied being behind the attack.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is due to meet Taliban negotiators in Doha in an effort to resume peace talks.

Earlier this week, the outgoing Trump administration announced plans to withdraw 2,000 troops from Afghanistan by mid-January. The decision was criticised amid concerns the sharp, fast reduction of troops would weaken the Afghan government’s ability to deal with a resurgent Taliban and other militants.

Many analysts fear the Afghan army is not strong enough to fight on its own if violence continues after foreign troops have left.

The rockets hit areas of central and north Kabul – including near the heavily fortified area that houses embassies and international companies – just before 09:00 (04:30 GMT). The Iranian embassy in Kabul said its compound was hit by rocket fragments but that no-one had been wounded.

In a statement, the Taliban denied involvement, saying they “do not blindly fire on public places”. A regional Islamic State group also operates in the country and has been behind recent attacks in Kabul, including two assaults on educations institutions that killed nearly 50 people in recent weeks.

The US started withdrawing troops from Afghanistan as part of an agreement signed by the US and the Taliban in February this year. But violence in the country has increased recently as the group stepped up its offensives amid stalled negotiations with the Afghan government.

Mr Pompeo is to meet representatives from the Taliban and the Afghan government in the Qatari capital Doha later. There are suggestions the US and the Taliban are finally close to signing off on the preliminary issues they have been discussing so far.

Justice Waqar Ahmad Seth, who has died after contracting coronavirus, was an outspoken judge of a kind rarely seen in Pakistan and an unlikely source of opposition to the powerful military.

Tributes described him as bold, fearless and independent. He was 59.

As chief justice of Peshawar High Court (PHC), he passed judgments that angered both the military and the government – including a death sentence on exiled former ruler General Pervez Musharraf that made headlines around the world.

He also challenged the establishment on human rights abuses, striking down a law under which the military ran secret internment centres, and acquitting dozens of people convicted under anti-terrorism laws for lack of evidence.

Justice Seth’s death is being seen as a major setback in a country where the military has been expanding its influence again in recent years.

Lawyers around the country have been in mourning since his death in an Islamabad hospital on 13 November.

The secretary-general of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Harris Khalique, called his death a “great blow to a judiciary struggling to be independent in Pakistan’s quasi democracy”.

Mr Khalique told the BBC that Justice Seth represented the tradition of “conscientious and fearless judges… who unfortunately always remained in a minority”.

Former senator Afrasiab Khatak said in a tweet that Justice Seth’s stature was raised not just by the list of his remarkable judgments, “but also the oppressive conditions that required courage for writing such judgments”.

Supreme Court Bar Association president Abdul Latif Afridi described him as “a courageous and uncompromising” person who didn’t shy away from a fight with the military.

“And he paid a personal price,” Mr Afridi told Dawn newspaper, recalling that the Peshawar chief justice had been denied elevation to the Supreme Court three times despite his seniority.

Justice Seth made history when the three-member special court he headed sentenced Gen Musharraf to death last year in absentia. The general had been found guilty of treason for suspending the constitution and imposing emergency rule in 2007.

It was the first time the treason clause in the constitution been applied to anyone, far less to a top military official by a civil court in a country where the military has controlled political decision-making for most of the time since its independence from British rule in 1947.

The penalty was unlikely to be carried out. Gen Musharraf, who has always denied any wrongdoing, had been allowed to leave Pakistan in 2016 on medical grounds.

The ruling allowed for this, saying if he died before he could be executed his corpse should be dragged outside parliament in Islamabad and “hanged for three days”.

There was outrage, with the government seeking to disbar Justice Seth for being unfit for office, and legal experts calling the instructions unconstitutional

A man who kidnapped and murdered his ex-girlfriend in a woodland hideout has been jailed for at least 25 years.

Andrew Pearson, 45, ambushed Natalie Harker as she cycled to work in Catterick, North Yorkshire on 9 October 2019.

Teesside Crown Court heard Ms Harker, 30, was drowned before her body was hidden in Pearson’s tent.

Police were called by Pearson’s mother after her son had phoned her claiming she had died in an accident.

Pearson told his mother the pair had been walking together when Ms Harker had accidently slipped and fallen into a river, North Yorkshire Police said.

The couple had split up weeks before and Ms Harker, who worked as a cleaner, had told family and friends she was scared of her ex-partner who had been pestering her by text.

Two days before she was killed she told people at her church she was worried she was being followed.

Detectives discovered Pearson had conducted a dry run and took photos of the various scenes days before he ambushed Ms Harker at about 04:30 BST on a secluded path near Colburn.

Passing sentence Judge Stephen Ashurst said only Pearson would know precisely what happened when he killed her by holding her underwater while compressing her neck.

“What happened thereafter was extraordinary,” he said.

“You took her lifeless body into the tent, stripped her of her clothes which you then folded and took into another part of the tent.

“Whether she was still breathing or not, you thought only of yourself, not just in the shock of the moment, but for hour after hour.”

The court heard Pearson did not summon help, but messaged a friend in the US, saying: “Goodbye, I have killed Natalie, I’m going to hand myself in.”

He then spent 42 minutes on a FaceTime call with that friend while in the tent with her body before calling his mother.

Pearson, of Chestnut Court, Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire, was given a minimum jail term of 25 years.

It will be the job of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to decide if the vaccine is safe to roll out.

It is not clear how long the FDA will take to study the data. However, the US government expects to approve the vaccine in the first half of December.

Data from an advanced trial showed the vaccine protects 94% of adults over 65.

The trial involved 41,000 people worldwide. Half were given the vaccine, and half a placebo.

The UK has pre-ordered 40 million doses and should get 10 million by the end of the year.

If FDA authorisation does come in the first half of next month, Pfizer and BioNTech will “be ready to distribute the vaccine candidate within hours”, the two companies said.

This would be remarkably quick for vaccine development – within 10 months of detailing the genetic code. The average wait for approval in the US is nearer eight years.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said on Thursday that the filing for emergency use was a “milestone in our journey to deliver a Covid-19 vaccine to the world”.

Initial doses would be scarce, though, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) will decide who is first in line.https://emp.bbc.com/emp/SMPj/2.36.3/iframe.htmlmedia captionCoronavirus vaccine: How close are you to getting one?

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the EU could move quickly too – by the end of the year.

But there are caveats. Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) would “conduct a very careful evaluation”.

And BBC health correspondent Naomi Grimley says this vaccine is still a long way off widespread use, not least because it adopts an experimental technology that has never been approved before.

Data released this week suggested the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine had 95% effectiveness.

This effectiveness was also consistent across age groups – essential given the vulnerability of the elderly – as well as ethnicities and gender.

The vaccine also had only mild-to-moderate and short-lived side-effects.

It uses an experimental approach, called mRNA, which involves injecting part of the virus’s genetic code into the body to train the immune system.

Antibodies and T-cells are then made by the body to fight the coronavirus.

The US this week passed 250,000 deaths in the coronavirus outbreak, by far the largest number in the world.

Its confirmed cases since the pandemic began stand at 11.7 million, according to Johns Hopkins University research, again a global first.

Cases have also been soaring over the past week, reaching record daily highs.

The health system in many areas is struggling to cope, with makeshift wards being created.

The CDCP has issued a “strong recommendation” that Americans refrain from travelling during the Thanksgiving holiday.

In California from Saturday there will be a 22:00 to 05:00 stay-at-home curfew for the vast majority of the population.

Ohio, Minnesota and New York are among other states imposing tough restrictions.

The transition of administrations has also not helped, with President-elect Joe Biden complaining of a lack of co-operation from Donald Trump’s government.

Defence funding boost ‘extends British influence’, says PM

A “once-in-a-generation modernisation” of the armed forces is required to extend British influence and protect the public, Boris Johnson has said.

The prime minister told MPs a new four-year funding deal would protect “hundreds of thousands” of jobs and create 40,000 new roles.

“I have decided that the era of cutting our defence budget must end, and it ends now,” he said.

Labour welcomed more defence spending but asked how it would be funded.

Outlining the new package in the Commons, the PM – speaking over video link as he is self-isolating – said the benefits “will go far beyond our armed forces”.

Mr Johnson described the increase in defence spending as being worth £16.5bn in new money over four years.

However economist Ben Zaranko, from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, said that while this represented a big rise in spending, the figure of £16.5bn was a “misleading way to present this announcement”.

He continued: “It would be more accurate to say that by 2024-25, defence spending will be £7bn higher than it would have been under previous plans.”

Mr Johnson said: “Our plans will safeguard hundreds of thousands of jobs in the defence industry, protecting livelihoods across the UK and keeping the British people safe.”

The PM pledged to end defence budget cuts, protect shipping lanes that supply the country, press on with renewing the UK’s nuclear deterrent and restore Britain as “the foremost naval power in Europe” with a “renaissance of British shipbuilding across the UK”.

He also said the funding would allow investment in new technology such as:

• A new centre dedicated to artificial intelligence
• The creation of a national cyber force, which he said was already operating against terrorists, organised crime groups and hostile states
• A new “RAF space command launching British satellites and our first rocket from Scotland in 2022”

“From aerospace to autonomous vehicles, these technologies have a vast array of civilian applications opening up new vistas of economic progress, creating 10,000 jobs every year – 40,000 in total – levelling-up across our country and reinforcing our union,” Mr Johnson added

A veteran Japanese singer has been suspended by his agency after admitting to an extra-marital affair.

Johnny & Associates said Masahiko Kondo’s “thoughtless” behaviour deserved “strict punishment”.

The 56-year-old has since been barred from all work engagements.

It is common for public figures in Japan to face censure and strict penalties after an affair is exposed, but some people have questioned the professional repercussions of this.

Mr Kondo’s relationship was first reported by a gossip magazine last week.

Johnny & Associates, one of Japan’s most powerful talent agencies, said that as a married man Mr Kondo’s “behaviour was thoughtless” and “lacked awareness and a sense of responsibility”.

“After careful consideration we decided that strict punishment was needed,” it said in a statement.

Mr Kondo, who was a J-Pop idol in the 1980s, had apologised and offered to step back to reflect on his behaviour and “to become a better person”, the agency added.

The singer, who is also known as Matchy, was widely criticised on social media as some fans expressed dismay about his behaviour, while others expressed sympathy for his wife.

But the news also did not surprise many as there had been previous reports about Mr Kondo’s affairs in Japan.

“In the current context of attention to women’s issues and #MeToo, his censure is a wake-up call for male celebrities,” said Professor Jennifer Robertson, an anthropologist specialising in Japan from the University of Michigan.

Some have questioned the scrutiny of his private life while not condoning his behaviour

Recording engineer Bruce Swedien, whose work on Michael Jackson’s albums Bad, Off the Wall and Thriller helped define the sound of 80s pop, has died aged 86.

Swedien’s daughter, Roberta, wrote that he “passed away peacefully” on Tuesday, in a message shared on Facebook.

“He had a long life full of love, great music, big boats and a beautiful marriage,” she said. “We will celebrate that life. He was loved by everyone.”

Quincy Jones also paid tribute, calling Swedien a “sonic genius”.

“He was without question the absolute best engineer in the business, and for more than 70 years I wouldn’t even think about going into a recording session unless I knew Bruce was behind the board,” wrote the legendary producer on Instagram.

“Along with the late great Rod Temperton [writer of Thriller and Off The Wall], we reached heights that we could have never imagined and made history together.

“I have always said it’s no accident that more than four decades later no matter where I go in the world, in every club, like clockwork at the witching hour you hear Billie Jean, Beat It, Wanna Be Starting Something, and Thriller.

“That was the sonic genius of Bruce Swedien, and to this day I can hear artists trying to replicate him.

Swedien won five Grammys over the course of his career, three for his work with Jackson and two for his work with Jones, on the albums Back on the Block and Q’s Jook Joint.

The engineer also worked with BB King, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Curtis Mayfield, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross and Jennifer Lopez across his long and storied career.

Unique drum sound

Born in Minneapolis in 1934, his interest in music started at the age of 10, when his father gave him a disc recording machine. Four years later, he scored a holiday job at a small local studio, and even set up his own radio station to broadcast the results.

By 21, he was recording the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but his big break was engineering Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ single Big Girls Don’t Cry, which sold more than a million copies and reached number one on the US R&B charts in 1962.

Swedien first met Quincy Jones when he was in his 20s, and discovered a kindred spirit. “We liked each other a lot,” he later recalled. “We think alike and our tastes are alike.”

They went on to record jazz artists like Duke Ellington and Dinah Washington together, but it was their work on Michael Jackson’s records that really cemented Swedien’s reputation.

A key component of those records was the “Acusonic Recording Process”, which Swedien pioneered. Essentially, it allowed the engineer to synchronise multiple 24-track tape machines, enabling him to record an almost limitless number of vocal and instrumental takes.

He also came up with several techniques that gave Jackson’s albums their unique feel.

To record drums, he built a braced, wooden platform raised 10 inches off the ground, to stop low-frequency sounds reflecting off the concrete floor and colouring the sound. That led to the distinctive, crisp thump that propels songs like Billie Jean and Rock With You.

MasterChef Junior star Ben Watkins has died aged 14 from a rare form of cancer, his family has confirmed.

The young chef, who appeared on the US version of the popular cooking show in 2018, died on Monday.

TV chef Gordon Ramsay, one of the show’s judges, described Ben as “an incredibly talented home cook and even stronger young man”.

His grandmother Donna Edwards and his uncle Anthony Edwards said in a statement, via his GoFundMe page: “Our Ben went home to be with his mother this afternoon after a year-and-a-half-long battle with cancer.

“Ben suffered more than his share in his 14 years on this Earth, but we take solace in that his suffering is finally over and in that, in the end, Ben knew he was loved by so many.”

Who was Ben Watkins?

Ben Watkins came from just outside of Chicago and honed his fledgling culinary skills by working at his father Michael’s barbecue restaurant.

Ben would operate the cash register and take orders, and also sold his own homemade cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls and banana bread.

He credited his baking skills to mother, commenting: “My mom taught me everything she knew. Or I just picked it up by watching her.”

However, in 2017, Ben’s father shot and killed Ben’s mother, Leila Edwards, before killing himself.

Ben’s grandmother and uncle then became his legal guardians.

The following year, aged 11, he featured on the Fox show MasterChef Junior, where his eye for a dessert combined with his tragic back story made him a viewers’ favourite.

Watkins’ first appearance saw him compete as one of 40 contestants, aged between nine and 13, for 24 spots on the show and a chance to win the $100,000 (£75,224) prize.

He bagged the final white apron of the night, by impressing the judges with a peach cobbler with whipped cream and caramel sauce.

He ultimately placed in the top 18 on the show.

Soon after his 13th birthday though, the newfound star was diagnosed with angiomatoid fibrous histiocytoma – a rare soft tissue tumour.

In July this year, he underwent chemotherapy treatment for tumours in his lung, spine and shoulder.

Following his death, a statement on the MasterChef Instagram page said Watkins had a “remarkably positive attitude” and was a “tremendous role model for chefs of all ages”.