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As bishops and cardinals gather in Rome, one man tells of his years-long attempt to see his alleged abuser put on trial

In early February, Arturo Borrelli handcuffed himself to a pole in front of the Vatican in a desperate plea to the Catholic church to take his allegations of sexual abuse by a priest seriously.

Ten years have passed since Borrelli, 43, opened up about the systematic assaults, including rape, that he says he endured as a child from his religion teacher, who was also a priest at a parish in the Naples district of Ponticelli.

Special forces said to be preparing to storm Baghuz to flush out last Islamic State diehards

They left Baghuz in a convoy of trucks, slowly snaking across the desert as thin trails of black smoke from mortar strikes drifted into the sky behind them.

The Islamic State fighters dangled their legs off the backs of vehicles normally used for transporting sheep. Brightly coloured keffiyehs wrapped around their faces, they stared at Kurdish troops as they passed without saying a word.

Swede, 16, says EU cannot just ‘wait for us to grow up and become the ones in charge’

The EU should double its climate change reduction targets to do its fair share in keeping the planet below a dangerous level of global warming, the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has told political and business leaders in Brussels.

Flanked by students from the Belgian and German school strike movements, the Swedish teenager said it was not enough to hope that young people were going to save the world.

Empire actor hands himself in after being charged with lying to police when he said he was victim of racist attack in Chicago

The actor Jussie Smollett has been arrested after he was charged with lying to police when he claimed he was attacked and beaten by two masked men shouting racist and homophobic slurs, Chicago police have said.

Smollett, 36, an openly gay actor who stars in the TV drama Empire, ignited a firestorm on social media by telling police on 29 January that two apparent supporters of Donald Trump had struck him, put a noose around his neck and poured bleach over him.

Police warn death toll may rise in ‘highly combustable’ blaze in old part of Bangladesh capital

At least 80 people have died after a massive fire engulfed apartment buildings that also housed chemical warehouses in the old city of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka.

Dozens of people were trapped in the buildings, unable to escape onto narrow streets clogged with traffic, as the highly-combustible stores of chemicals, body sprays and plastic granules erupted in flames. About 50 people were injured, some critically burned.

Follow the day’s political developments as they happen including Labour leader’s trip to Brussels to discuss his alternative plans for Brexit

• Exclusive: PM running down clock to force MPs into binary choice
  
• Two senior Tory MPs ready to quit if May fails to change Brexit direction
  

1.50pm GMT

Meanwhile, Michel Barnier has told a French newspaper that Brexit talks remain at an ‘impasse’, and repeated that Brussels will not consider reopening the Withdrawal Agreement or renegotiating the backstop.

“The process is in an impasse at the moment. We are waiting for Theresa May to tell us how she sees things and what she wants,” he tells La Croix.

1.50pm GMT

A bit more from Corbyn:

“The threat of no deal is something that has deeply exercised people throughout the European Union. They are very worried about the consequences of it.

French president says his party will introduce legislation to combat hate speech online

Antisemitism appears to have reached its worst levels since the second world war, Emmanuel Macron told Jewish community leaders on Wednesday, a day after thousands of people took to the streets in France to denounce hate crimes.

The French government is to adopt the intergovernmental organisation International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and propose a law to stop hate speech being circulated online, the French president said.

Canada’s PM losing support after claim he pressed minister not to prosecute firm

When Justin Trudeau embraced Canada’s attorney general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, last year in the country’s House of Commons, it became a moment emblematic of the powerful friendship between the two, part of the government’s promise to mend the broken relationship between the government and indigenous peoples in Canada.

Now, Wilson-Raybould is out of her job and Trudeau has found himself on the defensive, fending off accusations that members of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) – a powerful body staffed with hand-picked confidants – put pressure on Wilson-Raybould to not pursue criminal charges against a large Canadian engineering firm. The scandal has cast a shadow over Trudeau’s domestic image of commitment to transparent government, potentially harming his electoral prospects.

Adult female discovered 113 years after only other living Chelonoidis phantasticus was found

A living member of species of tortoise not seen in more than 110 years and feared to be extinct has been found in a remote part of the Galápagos island of Fernandina.

Related: Welcome home, Lonesome George: giant tortoise returns to Galapagos

Thousands sign petition to stop Dartmoor zoo charging £15 for experience of taking on a big cat

A zoo has been condemned by animal rights campaigners who have said it was cruel to charge visitors £15 to play tug-of-war with lions and tigers.

More than 2,000 people have signed a petition calling on Dartmoor zoo, near Plymouth, to end the attraction pitting four people against a big cat.

You see these gravity-defying quiffs everywhere in Iraq’s capital: on reception staff in the secure hotels, on waiters in cafes and on the youths who gather in Zawra amusement park on Friday afternoons. Often teamed with drainpipe trousers and a fitted jacket, the flashy, ostentatious haircut requires care. It says something of the city’s new confidence: a rejection of the long years of sanctions and war

The recent court decision against the neighbours of Tate Modern in London belies a much wider problem – everyone is constantly being watched

Alexander McFadyen says that he and his family were “more or less constantly watched” while they were at home. They had to be “properly dressed” at all times, and even then they were often photographed or filmed, and sometimes spied on with binoculars. McFadyen set out to measure the problem. While working at the dining table, he counted 84 people taking photographs in 90 minutes. This is the reality of living in a glass-walled flat in Block C of Neo Bankside, just 34 metres from the viewing gallery at Tate Modern, which receives up to 600,000 visitors a year.

A neighbour, Claire Fearn, said being watched like that made her “sick to her stomach”. People waved and made obscene gestures at her and her family. Her husband, Giles Fearn, found pictures of their home posted online by strangers. Many of the images are still on Twitter, often with amused remarks about the misfortune of their wealthy owners. (The flats are worth an average of £4.35m each.) Another neighbour, Lindsay Urquhart, visited the viewing gallery and heard someone remark that she and the other residents of Block C deserved to lose their privacy because they were “rich bastards”.

The next 15 megacities #15: The fast-growing South Korean capital is about to wipe out Euljiro, a neighbourhood home to 10,000 shops and 50,000 tradespeople that was integral to the country’s postwar boom

From the main street, the Euljiro neighbourhood doesn’t look like much: some shabby retail stores, cold-noodle restaurants, a Starbucks.

Enter one of the small alleys, however, and you’ll find yourself in a kind of manufacturing anthill: thousands upon thousands of shops, each crammed to the rafters with bolts, circuit boards, iron castings, gauges, wires, lights, switches, tools and innumerable tiny objects that defy description.

Hans Leo Maes captures the bridges and stairways that link up the hilly, population-dense city

Hong Kong is known for its flashing lights, neon signs and high-rise skylines. But the architect and photographer Hans Leo Maes documents an alternative side – the city’s interconnecting staircases and bridges.

“The extreme population density in Hong Kong means [structures] are stacked and linked by stairs, often external and very visible,” Maes says.

The obsession with fasting overlaps with a trend for what is often termed ‘biohacking’ – the idea that your body is a system that can be quantified and optimized

Eating is so last season; these days all the cool kids fast. Fasting diets have rocketed in popularity over the last few years, garnering a number of high-profile fans. Like Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, for example, who tweeted last month that he’d “been playing with fasting for some time.” Dorsey explained that he does “a 22 hour fast daily (dinner only), and recently did a 3 day water fast.” The billionaire added that the biggest thing he had noticed after depriving himself of food was “how much time slows down. The day feels so much longer when not broken up by breakfast/lunch/dinner. Any one (sic) else have this experience?”

I have! I’ve had lots of experience with the various side effects of fasting because I did it a ton as a teenager: it was called “anorexia.” And it wasn’t fun. It wrecked my health and took me years to recover.

Vaughan Dowd pleads guilty over incident victim says has left him ‘constantly on edge’

A man has admitted spraying racist graffiti on the door of a flat days after the residents moved in.

Appearing at Manchester magistrates court on Thursday, Vaughan Dowd, 54, of Salford, pleaded guilty to charges of criminal damage and racially aggravated criminal damage.

The smash hit Nordic noir tackles the far right, economic anxiety and environmental doom in its second season ... and woolly-jumper porn too

When Trapped first brought ice, intrigue and one of Iceland’s leading heartthrobs to our screens three years ago, it was hailed as the sleeper hit of the winter. But, as it returned last Saturday to BBC Four, audiences were no longer asleep; in the intervening years the series has been watched by 10 million people in the UK, Germany, France and, of course, Scandinavia – and with good reason.

If you’re yet to discover it, don’t hang about. The series centres on police chief Andri, played by aforementioned dreamboat Ólafur Darri Ólafsson and his colleagues on the force – sometimes farcical, sometimes touchingly familial – as they investigate some very murky goings-on. In the last series it was murders, corruption, arson and human trafficking that plagued the tiny northern town, Seyðisfjörður, that Andri calls home. Series two sees our beloved grizzly man take on another set of deeply dark happenings that torment Seyðisfjörður and its residents, his family included.

Chiwetel Ejiofor directs and stars in the inspiring real-life story of a teenager who brings electricity to his village in Malawi

Chiwetel Ejiofor has made his debut as writer-director, and the result is exhilarating and rather inspiring – a story of success against the odds, of ingenuity and resourcefulness, of a father and son painfully coming to terms with each other. Ejiofor brings a real sensitivity and empathy to this material, as well as some bold, fluent storytelling.

He has adapted a 2013 memoir by the Malawi engineer William Kamkwamba, which told the remarkable story of how as a teenager he provided electricity for his village by designing and building a wind turbine, hooked up to a simple bike-type dynamo. Ejiofor has exercised a little creative licence here and upped the narrative stakes, by making this turbine vital for pumping otherwise inaccessible well water for the drought-stricken village’s crops, and in doing so battling against his father’s angry realisation that his kid has done what he could not. But Ejiofor’s creative interventions are entirely justified. They speak to the larger ideas – the pain and confrontation involved in trying something radically new.

Report says few headlines sparked by food crises that ravaged Madagascar, Ethiopia and Haiti

Climate change was responsible for the majority of under-reported humanitarian disasters last year, according to analysis of more than a million online news stories.

Whole populations were affected by food crises in countries ravaged by by drought and hurricanes such as Ethiopia and Haiti, yet neither crisis generated more than 1,000 global news stories each.

Folding tablet hybrid shows Asia, not US or Europe, is leading the way in innovation

Samsung has placed its stake in the ground with its Galaxy Fold smartphone-tablet folding phone that is spectacular in every way, even in price, and pitches itself years ahead of its arch-rival, Apple.

Nearly a decade in the making, everything about the Galaxy Fold shouts next generation. It has a standard 4.6in phone screen on the front, but open it up like a book and you reveal a single large 7.3in screen that literally folds in half. No lines, no wrinkles, no visible crinkles. It’s a level of luxury and innovation not seen before, and it comes with a truly eye-watering price tag of $2,000. But no one said breaking boundaries was cheap.

Mark Dreyfus says the government has a ‘shameful record’ on appointments to the administrative appeals tribunal

Labor has blasted the attorney general Christian Porter for appointing six former parliamentarians and eight former staffers from Coalition ranks to the administrative appeals tribunal.

Porter announced a total of 34 new appointments to the tribunal on Thursday, including former Liberal Senate president Stephen Parry, who received a seven-year term after quitting politics in 2017 over his dual citizenship.

Darwin Zerpa is among those who have fled to Peru to get the antiretrovirals he needs. Now he counsels others with the virus

By day it is one of Lima’s grandest squares. By night the Plaza San Martín becomes a magnet for nightclubbers and bag-snatchers, as well as a haunt for male sex workers and their clients.

It is here just before midnight that 29-year-old Darwin Zerpa and other volunteers set up shop. Pulling up in an out-of-service ambulance and folding out a table on the pavement, they mark out a spot where passersby can get HIV finger-prick test results in less than 10 minutes.

Stalled relief supplies for Venezuela at the Colombian border are a stark illustration of Trump’s crudely transactional approach to aid

In their grey livery, the US Air Force C-17s shuttling into Camilo Daza airport in Cúcuta, Colombia, look more belligerent than friendly – which is, perhaps, the point.

In the city itself, the planes’ cargo – boxes labelled USAid and intended for distribution by the Venezuelan opposition just across the border – are accumulating in the town’s warehouses.

Constant hunger and thirst haunt those stranded in the desert, where escape means paying vast sums to smugglers

Between the southern border of Syria, Jordan and Iraq lies a stretch of land akin to purgatory. More than 40,000 people are stranded in Rukban, almost 300km from Damascus.

Families here are cut off from the world, facing hunger and lacking healthcare, transport and education.

Campaigners say resurgence of deadly virus threatens despite huge successes of vaccination drive

The unmonitored movement of people across the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan threatens efforts to eradicate polio from the two countries, as the year’s first cases of the virus are recorded in the volatile region.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative said people travelling through unchecked crossings is believed to be one of the main causes of the spread of the disease in the area.

More than 200 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation and about 3 million more are at risk every year. Africa has the highest numbers, but its young people are fighting back

Photographs by the Girl Generation

The state, which styles itself as the Democratic-led ‘resistance’, has launched 46 lawsuits against the Trump administration

The Trump administration’s plans to pull millions in federal funding from California’s high-speed rail project is just the latest antagonism between the president and the state that stands on the opposite end of his party’s ideological spectrum.

Governor Gavin Newsom called the move “political retribution” for the state’s lawsuit against Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, but California and Trump have been at it since before he was even elected president.

Though Trump himself suggested there is no real emergency, courts are unlikely to second-guess a president’s broad leeway

Many legal analysts who watched Donald Trump declare a national emergency over immigration on Friday thought the president had weak legal grounds for doing so. In particular, many thought Trump hurt his own case by admitting, right there in the White House Rose Garden: “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

“This quote should be the first sentence of the first paragraph of every complaint filed this afternoon,” tweeted George Conway, a top Washington lawyer and the husband of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway.

Attempt to hustle Japan into a trade deal highlights the problems facing ‘global Britain’

It takes a lot to anger the unfailingly polite, anglophile Japanese. But Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, and Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, appear to have managed it with their ill-judged attempt to hustle Tokyo into a quick-fire Brexit trade deal.

The diplomatic fumble has highlighted rapidly escalating difficulties facing “global Britain” – the government’s nebulous vision for life after the EU – in forging new business and trade relationships around the world without an agreed post-Brexit strategy.

I had to gain the confidence that always seemed to come naturally to my partner to release my inner handywoman

Last year my partner and I moved into a new house. The whole exercise was exhilarating – finally, a place we owned – but it also unearthed in me a desperation, a deep frustration. For a long time I’ve wanted to be someone who fixes things, builds things, someone who is capable in practical day-to-day tasks. I own tools, I have ideas and I tinker with my surroundings, but I’ve never felt completely at ease in the tasks that various men in my life seem to take on with no backward glance.

In our just-built house there were so many jobs to do with drills, hammers, caulking guns. My drive to learn by doing was offset by disorientation and self-doubt. I wanted to begin improving our house, but I didn’t know what sort of screws I needed for the curtain rod brackets, or whether I could just drill straight into the plasterboard. My partner, a man, didn’t have much more experience in these things than I did, but approached the situation with a confidence and bluster that only confused me more.

Visitors to Dartmoor zoo are being offered the opportunity to take part in its ‘human v beast’ challenge, with groups of people playing tug-of-war against a lion as it tries to wrestle meat attached to a rope.

The controversial attraction, which costs £15 per person, has sparked a backlash with more than 2,000 people signing a petition to stop the practice. The petition’s author, Sue Dally, described it as, ‘cruel and shows a total lack of respect for these beautiful majestic wild animals’

Barack Obama offered some advice on self-confidence to young men at an event hosted by his foundation in Oakland, California, on Tuesday.

When asked by a member of the audience about his definition of being a man, and how it relates to the LGBT+ community, the former US president said being a man was ‘first and foremost being a good human’ before going on to say that ‘if you are very confident about your sexuality, you don’t have to have eight women around you twerking’

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets across France in protest against an increase in the number of antisemitic attacks in the country. Recent incidents have included a Jewish cemetery being desecrated with swastikas and the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut being subjected to a torrent of hate speech on the fringe of a gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest in Paris

Thousands take to streets of France after antisemitic attacks

For the first time in its history, Beijing’s famous landmark is bathed in light as part of the Lantern festival marking the end of the lunar new year celebrations

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who ran against Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, has announced his run for the presidency in 2020. Sanders, 77, running as a Democrat, will be up against a more crowded and diverse field this time round   

• Bernie Sanders announces run for presidency in 2020

Donald Trump has used a speech in Miami, Florida, to issue a direct appeal to members of the Venezuelan military to back opposition leader Juan Guaidó. The influential Venezuelan military has so far remained largely loyal to current president,  Nicolás Maduro. The US president told the crowd: 'We seek a peaceful transition of power, but all options are open'

• Ditch Maduro or lose everything, Trump tells Venezuelan army

Four years ago, 24-year-old Hoda Muthana left her family in the US to travel to Syria and join Islamic State. Now, after being captured by Kurdish forces, she is pleading to return home to Alabama

* Hear the Guardian's Middle East correspondent, Martin Chulov, speak to Hoda Muthana about her life with Isis and eventual escape on tomorrow's Today in Focus