BAUCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) - At least 30 passengers on a bus in Nigeria’s Sokoto state were burnt to death when gunmen torched it on Tuesday, police and residents said, in yet another reminder of growing insecurity in Africa’s most populous country. Gunmen, known locally as bandits, have in the past year carried out violent attacks targeting villagers and commuters travelling on highways and kidnapped hundreds of school children for ransom in the north of the country.

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PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia’s Appeal Court on Wednesday upheld the conviction and 12-year jail sentence of ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak linked to the massive looting of the 1MDB state investment fund that brought down his government in 2018. Najib was found guilty by a high court in July 2020 of abuse of power, criminal breach of trust and money laundering for illegally receiving 42 million ringgit ($9.9 million) from SRC International, a former unit of 1MDB. It was the first of several corruption trials against Najib that are linked to the 1MDB scandal, which sparked investigations in the U.S. and several other countries.

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LONDON (Bloomberg) - Deaths and hospitalizations from Covid-19 will continue to rise in Europe in the coming weeks as vaccination rates remain insufficient to counter the trends, a key European health agency warned.
European countries have taken a varying set of measures to combat the spread of the virus, including lockdowns for the unvaccinated and early closing for restaurants and bars. But Andrea Ammon, the director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said the toll is still growing.

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KYIV (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday welcomed U.S. President Joe Biden’s “personal role” in trying to attain peace in eastern Ukraine, in his first comments after Biden held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin a day earlier. Speaking at a news conference, Zelenskiy also hoped that Ukraine and Russia could agree a new ceasefire and prisoner exchanges when their representatives held talks on the conflict in Ukraine’s easterly Donbass region on Wednesday. “In general, I think it is positive that the president of the United States spoke with the president of the Russian Federation,” Zelenskiy said.

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LONDON (Reuters) - An adviser to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has quit after a video surfaced of her laughing and joking about a party in Downing Street during a Christmas COVID-19 lockdown last year when such festivities were banned. Allegra Stratton, who was most recently Johnson’s COP26 spokeswoman, was his press secretary at the time the video was recorded in December 2020. In the video aired by ITV, Stratton was shown at a rehearsal for a daily briefing laughing and joking about a reported gathering at a time when tens of millions of people across Britain were banned from meeting family and friends to celebrate Christmas, or even from bidding farewell to dying relatives.