US President Joe Biden’s aircraft has landed at Knock Airport as he returns to his roots in County Mayo. Mr Biden has links to the county through his great grandfather Edward Blewitt. The president is due to speak at a homecoming celebration outside St Muredach’s Cathedral in Ballina on Friday night. A crowd of up to 20,000 people are expected to line the streets of the town for the event. It is thought that the president will be presented with a brick from a fireplace that is the last surviving piece of his ancestral home in the town. The mayor of Ballina, Mark Duffy, said people were eagerly awaiting the president’s arrival. “This is a homecoming event, it’s a welcome home where he has family and friends in the area,” he told BBC News NI. “I hope there is respect given to that because they are true ties, they are sincere links, it’s not engineered, it’s not fabricated. “It’s meaningful for the president, it’s meaningful for the people here in town.”(BBC)…[+]

A major prisoner swap between warring sides in Yemen is under way, seen as part of stepped-up efforts to end the devastating eight-year conflict there. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said detainees were being flown from the rebel-held capital, Sanaa, to government-held Aden. About 900 prisoners are expected to be exchanged over the next three days. The war between rebels and pro-government Saudi-led forces has left tens of thousands of Yemenis dead. It has also created what the UN has called one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with some 80% of the population forced to rely on food aid to survive. The exchange – the largest since late 2020 – is seen as a confidence-building measure, following talks earlier this week in Sanaa between a Saudi delegation and Houthi rebels aimed at reaching a new and potentially permanent ceasefire.(BBC)…[+]

A Peruvian ex-interior minister was complicit in the 1988 killing of Hugo Bustíos, a journalist who investigated human rights abuses, a court has found. The former minister, Daniel Urresti, has been sentenced to 12 years in jail. The court ruled that Urresti, who at the time was a military intelligence officer in the army, took part in the ambush and murder of Mr Bustíos. Lawyers for the politician said they would appeal against the verdict. Hugo Bustíos, a reporter for the weekly magazine Caretas, was killed at the height of the conflict between Peruvian security forces and rebels of the Maoist Shining Path group. The journalist reported on human rights abuses committed both by the rebels and the army in the Andean region of Ayacucho, one of the hardest hit by the armed conflict which left 69,000 people dead or disappeared. On the day of his killing, he was heading to investigate the killing of a villager and her son, reportedly by the Shining Path. He and a fellow journalist, Eduardo Rojas, were ambushed and shot at while they were making their way to the village by motorcycle. (BBC)…[+]

Ghana is the first country to approve a new malaria vaccine that has been described as a “world-changer” by the scientists who developed it. The vaccine – called R21 – appears to be hugely effective, in stark contrast to previous ventures in the same field. Ghana’s drug regulators have assessed the final trial data on the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness, which is not yet public, and have decided to use it. The World Health Organization is also considering approving the vaccine. Malaria kills about 620,000 people each year, most of them young children. It has been a massive, century-long, scientific undertaking to develop a vaccine that protects the body from the malaria parasite. Trial data from preliminary studies in Burkina Faso showed the R21 vaccine was up to 80% effective when given as three initial doses, and a booster a year later. But widespread use of the vaccine hinges on the results of a larger trial involving nearly 5,000 children.