The carmaker Volkswagen has suspended its head of external relations and sustainability after admitting that he had known about experiments in which monkeys were locked in small chambers and exposed to diesel exhaust. Thomas Steg, a former government spokesman who worked for German chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, is the first person to be relieved of his duties as VW said it was “drawing the consequences” of the scandal, which has rocked both the government and industry.

The company initially tried to distance itself from the institute that commissioned the tests, the European Research Group of Environment and Health in the Transport Sector (EUGT), a car lobby group funded by Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. But it is now known that VW managers were informed about the testing before and after it was carried out. Steg has been pinpointed as a senior manager who knew that the experiments were going on, with internal papers seen by German media suggesting he had known about them in 2013.(theguardian)…[+]

Amazon is diving into healthcare, teaming up with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the New York bank JP Morgan to create a company that helps their US employees find quality care “at a reasonable cost” and tackle the “hungry tapeworm on the American economy”.

The business giants offered few details on Tuesday and said the project is in the early planning stage. But the move from Amazon, which has long eyed the US’s enormous health market, sent shares in health insurance companies and pharmacy chains into a tailspin.“The ballooning costs of [healthcare] act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Buffett said in a statement. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable. Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.”(theguardian)…[+]

The Egyptian politician Mousa Mostafa Mousa has said he will stand in the presidential elections, hours before a nomination deadline was set to make President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi the sole candidate after withdrawals and a boycott call.

Several leading opposition figures had called on Sunday for a boycott of the March election, citing a wave of repression that has cleared the field of challengers to Sisi and left his top opponent in jail. Sisi, a former military commander, was elected in 2014, a year after leading the army to oust the Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. He is expected to easily win the vote, the third since protests in 2011 unseated long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak.Mousa, who leads the Ghad party, told Reuters he was at the electoral commission registering his candidacy after having collected the required number of nomination pledges.(theguardian)…[+]

Every day, early in the morning, the former missile scientist would leave his house in Mosul. Riding buses, or on foot – he could no longer afford petrol – he’d call on friends, check on his mother or visit his sister’s family. Sometimes he’d hunt for cheap kerosene, or try to score contraband books or cigarettes. Most often, he’d meander aimlessly – a traveller in his own city.

In the evening, he’d sit at his old wooden desk, bent over his notebook, recording the day. Most of what he wrote was banal: the price of tomatoes, a quarrel with his wife. But he also wrote his observations of the remarkable events unfolding in Mosul.

“I must live this moment and record it,” reads one entry, from August 2014, two months after the fall of the city. “We live like prisoners serving long jail sentences. Some of us will come out having finished reading dozens of books. Others will be devastated and destroyed.” By the time he stopped writing, he’d filled five volumes. They are the handwritten diaries of a city under occupation, and a chart of how the Islamic State tried to live up to its name – by running a city.(theguardian)…[+]

The British government will be warned on Monday not to ignore the unfinished business of the EU divorce if it wants to secure a Brexit trade and transition deal.

Six weeks after EU leaders gave their blessing to moving the Brexit talks on to future arrangements, frustration is mounting that the UK is “not ready” to complete the divorce, which the EU deems essential for a deal before Britain’s departure on 29 March 2019.In December the EU declared that London had made sufficient progress on the Brexit divorce issues of the Irish border, money and protecting citizens’ rights, but the government is perceived in Brussels to have made little advance since.

The Irish border issue is the most difficult hurdle, but negotiators must also resolve a host of technical matters, including Euratom, police cooperation and the role of the European court of justice. European affairs ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday will issue a “gentle reminder” not to lose sight of these issues, one senior official told the Guardian.“The feeling here in Brussels is that the UK is pushing these on to the back burner and is now focusing more attention on the transition and the future,” the official said. “The message is don’t lose this out of sight, because we want to have it settled as well. And if we don’t have it settled this thing could go to the wire.”(theguardian)…[+]