التصنيف: أخبار

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classified the JN.1 COVID strain as a “variant of interest”.

Announcing the new classification, the UN agency stressed the risk posed by the strain is considered “low”.

“Based on the available evidence, the additional global public health risk posed by JN.1 is currently evaluated as low,” WHO said.

It said existing vaccines continued to be effective against severe disease and death from JN.1 and other circulating variants.

The classification comes as COVID cases rise in the UK in the run-up to Christmas.

The latest data, which covers the week ending 9 December, shows COVID cases increasing by 39% in England on the previous week.

Read more on Sky News:
COVID cases are rising – what if I catch it at Christmas?
COVID: Almost 40% of over-65s not yet taken booster jab for Christmas
People removed from COVID inquiry as Boris Johnson apologises

JN.1 is a sub-lineage of the BA.2.86 Omicron variant.

It has one mutation in its spike protein – which dictates how easily it can infect our cells – compared to BA.2.86. But there are several other mutations elsewhere.

Speaking to Sky News earlier this month, Professor of innate immunity at the University of Cambridge, Clare Bryant, said the changes were likely to mean JN.1 evades our immune systems more easily – and replicates faster.

“The change in the spike protein will probably correlate to it being more infectious,” she said.

However, there has so far been no indication of increased disease severity, according to Professor Nicolas Locker, a virologist at the Pirbright Institute.

“I think we’re just seeing the natural evolution of COVID and I don’t think there’s anything right now we should be overly worried about,” he said.

“These are very small changes in comparison to the ones between Omicron and the previous set of variants. And we haven’t seen a change in symptoms or severity.”

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) latest projections, JN.1 currently makes up an estimated 15% – 29% of cases in the UK.

A woman has been found guilty of involvement in the murders of three people, including a British student, by a man dubbed the ‘Beast of the Ardennes’.

Monique Olivier, who was already serving a life prison sentence for her part in other murders, was tried 33 years after Joanna Parrish was killed in the French city of Auxerre.

Olivier was found guilty of complicity in her murder, as well as those of Marie-Angele Domece in 1988 and Estelle Mouzin in 2003.

She has now been handed a second life sentence, with a minimum prison term of 20 years.

Her head remained bowed, with her eyes almost completely closed, throughout the sentencing – in which the gruesome details about the murders were read out.

Speaking after the hearing, Joanna’s father, Roger Parrish, said his family were “satisfied” that the court had “recognised Monique Olivier’s part in the murder of our daughter and sister”.

“There’s never been any doubt in our minds at all that she was equally responsible for the murder of Joanna and the other completely innocent victims,” he said.

“From the very first moment that a victim was identified, she knew exactly what would happen to them, and not only did she do nothing to help them, but she actively encouraged and participated.

“Her presence alone would have gained the confidence of all the victims, who would never have believed a woman could be a part of such an appalling and depraved act.

“Finally, we now hope after this last obstacle in our struggle to gain an element of justice for Joanna has been overcome, we can remember our daughter and sister with a smile on our faces, which is how of course her many friends remember her.”

Asked later by Sky News later how he felt about the verdict, he said: “I think relief, probably.

“We always wanted to achieve some sense of justice for our daughter because she deserved, believe me, she really deserved it.

“She deserved a long, happy, and fulfilled life, which I’m sure she would have had, had she not had the desperate, desperate misfortune to come across a couple like them.

“So we did it to bring an element of justice for Jo.”

‘The Beast of the Ardennes’

Joanna, a 20-year-old university student from Gloucestershire, was working in France as part of her university course.

She was murdered by Olivier’s husband, Michel Fourniret, in May 1990.

Joanna had placed an advert in a paper offering English lessons and had been contacted by Fourniret, who arranged to meet her and claimed he wanted to organise lessons for his son.

Her body was found in the River Yonne and a post-mortem showed that Joanna had been raped, beaten and strangled.

Fourniret is one of the most notorious serial killers in France’s history.

He was convicted of killing eight women, but died in 2021 before he could be tried for the murders of Joanna, as well as Marie-Angele Domece, 18, and Estelle Mouzin, 9.

He may have killed other victims, who have not yet been identified.

Olivier was his accomplice throughout.

Read more from Sky News:
Universal Studios confirms plans for first UK attraction
A&E department to close due to junior doctors’ strikes

The pair first got to know each other as pen-pals in 1984, when Fourniret was in prison for sexually assaulting five young girls.

In letters that were never checked by prison authorities, he told Olivier of his fantasies of raping and murdering young girls.

Olivier, far from being appalled, said that she would help him fulfil those dreams as long as Fourniret, in turn, murdered her husband.

In the end, her first husband, Andre Michaux, survived, although his property was burnt down.

But Fourniret’s side of the bargain was to be fulfilled in a truly horrific way.

Repeatedly, Olivier acted as a lure – tricking girls and young women into entering a vehicle, thinking they were safe.

Instead, Fourniret was waiting inside, ready to assault and then kill his victims.

Couple used baby son to reassure victims

Olivier and Fourniret had a son, called Selim.

Olivier used her pregnancy to further reassure victims and then, after his birth, even exploited her baby.

On one notorious occasion, she asked a 12-year-old girl, Elisabeth Brichet, for help with her crying baby, pleading for her to come to the van and give directions to a doctor.

A few minutes later, Olivier sat with her child in the front seat of their van while, behind them, Fourniret was brutally attacking Elisabeth before later killing her.

In court, she gave evidence for day after day, standing in a dock that was surrounded by tall glass.

Watched by the families of all three victims, Olivier admitted that what she had done had been “monstrous” but said she had been intimidated by Fourniret, and scared of defying him.

The prosecution, as at her previous trials, admitted her involvement in the murders but claimed that she had, in fact, been a willing participant and had repeatedly passed over chances to help victims escape.

‘I couldn’t cry for six months’

Olivier, now 75 years old, stood up and spoke with a clear, conversational tone, her voice occasionally slowing and softening.

She rarely showed any emotion, even when admitting her role in the deaths.

She said Joanna didn’t deserve to die and that she was “a beautiful girl.”

But she also clashed angrily with her own son when he gave evidence against her.

She mocked the disguise he wore on a video link and he responded by saying: “Now you see the real Monique Olivier”.

Joanna’s murder left her parents devastated.

Her mother Pauline Murrell told Sky News: “They said she was found in the water, and I was staring out of a window and I simply couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t cry for six months.

“Then I got the post-mortem report and I opened it on a Sunday morning, and I wasn’t able to get out of bed.”

Roger Parrish said: “She deserved a long and happy, fulfilled life. She worked hard and she deserved it. She was helpful, part of the community. People still remember her.

“Jo was a kind person but she was also bright and smart. She was not likely to have trusted a man who was by himself.

“When we found out that there was a female accomplice, I remember thinking that we had never thought of that. Why would we have done? But right from that moment, I thought, ‘this is it – this is the person’.”

At least 100 elephants have died in Zimbabwe’s largest national park amid a drought.

Experts from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) say the elephants died at Hwange National Park due to a lack of water.

The national park, Zimbabwe’s largest, is home to around 45,000 elephants, as well as more than 100 other types of mammals and 400 bird species.

It has 104 solar-powered boreholes to maintain sources of water for the animals.

However, park authorities say there are not enough and the boreholes are no match for extreme temperatures, which are drying up existing waterholes and forcing wildlife to walk long distances searching for food and water.

“The most affected elephants are the young, elderly and sick that can’t travel long distances to find water,” according to Tinashe Farawo, a spokesman for the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority.

The deaths of the elephants are a sign of what wildlife authorities and conservation groups say is the impact of climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon.

“El Nino is making an already dire situation worse,” according to Mr Farawo.

El Nino is a natural and recurring weather phenomenon that warms parts of the Pacific, affecting weather patterns around the world.

It occurs every few years, in a cycle with its opposite phenomenon, La Nina, which sees episodes of cooler-than-average sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific.

The pattern typically lasts 12 months and peaks in December.

However, studies indicate that climate change may be making El Ninos stronger, leading to more extreme consequences.

Read more from Sky News:
El Nino: What is it and how does it impact the weather closer to home?
Temperatures worldwide set to break records in 2023 and 2024

While this year’s El Nino has already brought deadly floods to East Africa, it is expected to cause below-average rainfall across southern Africa.

In Zimbabwe, there has been a recent spell of rising heat and a scarcity of rain. And, while some rain has now fallen, the forecasts are generally for a dry, hot summer ahead.

Authorities fear a repeat of 2019 – another El Nino year – when more than 200 elephants in Hwange died in a severe drought.

“This phenomenon is recurring,” said Phillip Kuvawoga, a landscape programme director at IFAW, which raised the alarm for Hwange’s elephants in a report this month.

Zimbabwe’s rainy season once started reliably in October and ran through to March.

However, it has become erratic in recent years and conservationists have noticed longer, more severe dry spells.

“Our region will have significantly less rainfall, so the dry spell could return soon because of El Nino,” said Trevor Lane, director of The Bhejane Trust, a conservation group which assists Zimbabwe’s parks agency.

Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

He said his organisation had been pumping 1.5 million litres of water into Hwange’s waterholes daily from more than 50 boreholes it manages in partnership with park authorities.

Hwange does not have a major river flowing through it and relies on around 100 solar-powered boreholes that pump water for the animals.

An average-sized elephant needs a daily water intake of about 200 litres.

The oldest female elephants remember the locations of water sources they have visited before and can lead their herd hundreds of miles to them.

CCTV footage has shown the moment a dog owner threw her Maltese Shih Tzu off the top of a multi-storey car park in Australia.

The dog, named Princess, had to be put down after she was taken to a vet by a passerby who found the animal in the car park of the Westfield Whitford City shopping centre in Perth, western Australia, in April 2022.

The passerby assumed the 10-year-old dog, which fell nine metres, had been hit by a car due to the seriousness of its injuries – which included possible internal haemorrhaging, brain injury, and spinal and pelvic trauma.

Amy Judge, the 26-year-old owner of the dog, was jailed for 12 months on Tuesday and banned from owning an animal for 10 years.

She admitted throwing her dog from the top storey of the car park in the weeks after the attack and said she “did her a favour because all I did was hurt her and abuse her”.

Judge, from Clarkson in Perth, wrote: “I can’t live with the guilt, I threw my dog off the top story (sic) of a shopping centre car park and watched her fall to her death but she survived and needed to be put down due to how badly I injured her.”

The post, which attracted 112 comments, continues: “I killed my dog and I need the truth out in the open… it’s tearing me apart I can’t live with the lies anymore… I did her a favour because all I did was hurt her and abuse her.”

She adds: “Now everybody knows the truth and I can put my mind at ease knowing I no longer have to live with all the lies.”

Scott Frost, her 23-year-old partner, who was present during the incident, was fined 2,500 Australian dollars and banned from owning animals for three years for failing to seek veterinary care for Princess.

CCTV footage played in court shows Judge appearing to argue with Frost, repeatedly dangling Princess over the side of the roof, and allowing the animal to walk along the roof edge for around eight minutes.

The footage then shows Judge throw Princess off the roof.

Read more world news
Widow of serial killer guilty of involvement in British student’s murder
The best pictures and video from the Iceland volcano eruption

A ‘planned, deliberate and intentional act’

A vet later checked Princess’s microchip and contacted Judge, who was listed as her owner.

Judge went to the veterinary practice with Frost to discuss the extent of the dog’s injuries and the cost of treatment, ultimately deciding to have her put down.

In sentencing, Magistrate Mark Millington said Judge had left Princess for dead in what he described as a “planned, deliberate, and intentional act”.

Kylie Green, inspector manager at the RSPCA in Western Australia, described the incident as the “most distressing” she had seen in her 11 years on the job.

She added it was a “callous and extremely confronting display of animal cruelty”.

Judge was jailed ten months for throwing her dog over the ledge and two months for unrelated incidents.

Iceland is witnessing spectacular scenes of orange and gold as a volcano erupts in the southwest of the country.

Semi-molten rock has been spewing into air from a crack around 2.5 miles long near the fishing town of Grindavik.

Locals were evacuated in November after thousands of small earthquakes were recorded, raising the likelihood of an eruption.

It finally burst into life on Monday night.

Here are some of the most striking images and video so far.

Despite the fiery images, experts say the volcanic activity is becoming less intense compared with the initial eruption on Monday.

Forecasters have warned gas pollution could hit the Icelandic capital – but so far there’s no disruption to air travel.

A 2010 eruption at another Icelandic volcano caused thousands of flights to be cancelled or delayed.

Iceland‘s government has insisted “the eruption does not present a threat to life”.

Grindavik residents have been out of their homes for a month and now definitely won’t be allowed back for Christmas, its mayor has confirmed.

One resident, Hans Vera, described his home near the sea as idyllic but said he and others now faced a “waiting game”.

“We are not going to paradise this time around,” he said.

It’s unclear how long the volcanic activity in Iceland – known as the ‘land of fire and ice’ – will last for. It could simmer down in days, but may rumble on for months.

Read more:
Is it still safe to go to Iceland?
What’s happening under the surface?

Passengers on a plane from Manchester early on Tuesday morning got a stunning view of the eruption – and many swapped seats to allow others a look.

Traveller Sophie Molloy said some passengers were anxious when they landed and asked to be allowed off quickly.

She said there was a distinctive smell of sulphur in the air when the doors opened.