Good morning.
Ukraine will be responsible for its own destruction if it undermines existing peace agreements, a senior Russian diplomat has warned at a combative UN security council debate on the crisis.
The comments from Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, came on a day of continued high-level diplomacy aimed at defusing the Ukraine crisis.
The state department said it had received a response from the Kremlin to a document the US delivered in Moscow last week, formally outlining areas where the Biden administration believes the two countries could find common ground. US officials would not disclose the contents of the Russian letter, saying they would not “negotiate in public”.
Russia’s state news agency RIA reported that Russia had sent follow-up questions rather than a response, and that Moscow was still working on a response.
What did Nebenzya say about Ukraine? “If our western partners push Kyiv to sabotage the Minsk agreements, something that Ukraine is … willingly doing, then that might end in the absolute worst way for Ukraine. And not because somebody has destroyed it, but because it would have destroyed itself and Russia has absolutely nothing to do with this.”
What happens next? The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, are due to talk on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, may meet in person soon.
Boris Johnson under fire after release of redacted report into lockdown parties
Boris Johnson has been challenged by a Conservative backbencher to commit to publishing the full report on Downing Street parties, as his deputy, Dominic Raab, said it was “unclear” if there was further evidence to come.
Mark Harper, a former Conservative chief whip, told the Guardian he had asked Johnson to reiterate at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions his promise – made in private to MPs – to publish the full report.
A party in Boris and Carrie Johnson’s flat is one of 12 events being investigated by the Metropolitan police over alleged lockdown breaches, it has emerged, as the Sue Gray report into breaches of lockdown rules found “failures of leadership and judgment” in No 10.
Gray, a senior civil servant, criticised the culture in Johnson’s Downing Street that allowed social gatherings to take place during lockdown, which were “difficult to justify”. The findings were released on the government’s website in a shortened and redacted form, after the Met last week said it was investigating some of the gatherings.
In a dramatic moment in the Commons where the report was being discussed, Johnson was challenged by Theresa May, his predecessor as prime minister, who said either he “had not read the rules, didn’t understand the rules or didn’t think they applied to No 10”.
The police have obtained more than 300 photographs and 500 pages of documents in their investigation. The images include pictures taken at alleged parties and from security-system cameras.
Whoopi Goldberg apologises for saying Holocaust ‘isn’t about race’
The US talkshow host and actor Whoopi Goldberg has offered her “sincerest apologies” after saying the Holocaust “isn’t about race”.
She said Jewish people around the world had “always had my support”, in a statement after her remarks led to a backlash online.
Goldberg, who co-hosts The View on ABC, said the atrocity was about “man’s inhumanity to man”. She made the comments on the show during a discussion about a Tennessee school board’s decision to ban the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel Maus.
In a statement posted on Twitter, Goldberg said: “On today’s show I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man’. I should have said it is about both. As Jonathan Greenblatt from of the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people, who they deemed to be an inferior race’. I stand corrected.”
What did Goldberg say on the show? “Let’s be truthful, the Holocaust isn’t about race, it’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people.”
In other news …
The Azimuth music festival in Saudi Arabia, a government-backed event that cost $20m, was secretly organised by the youth media company Vice, as part of the organisation’s push to make money in the Middle Eastern state despite its poor human rights record, it has emerged.
A video of a woman apparently locked against her will in a filthy shack has gone viral in China, prompting an investigation as well as a conversation about the country’s treatment of people with mental illness. Standing in freezing conditions, the woman appeared to be chained by her neck to a concrete wall.
The New York Times has acquired the viral word game Wordle for an undisclosed seven-figure sum, the publisher announced. The newspaper promised Wordle would remain free to play for new and existing players and no changes would be made to its gameplay.
The threat to the west from the Chinese government is “more brazen, more damaging” than ever, the FBI director, Christopher Wray, has said, accusing Beijing of stealing American ideas and innovation and launching massive hacking operations.
Don’t miss this: are Mattel movies about to take over Hollywood?
This weekend, the Mattel Films executive vice-president, Robbie Brenner, gave an interview to Variety, during which she laid out her ambitious plans for cinematic domination. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling have signed on to star in a Barbie movie directed by Greta Gerwig, working from a script she co-wrote with Noah Baumbach. Lena Dunham is writing and directing a Polly Pocket movie starring Lily Collins. Akiva Goldsman is writing a Major Matt Mason film that will star Tom Hanks.
Climate check: climate crisis threatens future of Kenya’s El Molo people
Surrounded by a barren landscape and dotted with black volcanic rocks, Lake Turkana, a Unesco world heritage site, has increased in area by more than 10% over the past decade, submerging close to 800 sq km of land. It has obliterated El Molo’s fishing sites, destroyed freshwater infrastructure, engulfed burial grounds and brought the community in proximity with ferocious Nile crocodiles, hippos and snakes.
Last Thing: Rihanna lets the world know she is pregnant in the most Rihanna way possible
Leave it to music’s perennially best-dressed couple, the Bajan superstar Rihanna and her boyfriend, the rapper A$AP Rocky, to reinvent the genre of celebrity pregnancy announcement; “papped” by the fashion-friendly photographer Miles Diggs; walking the streets of Harlem, where Rocky grew up, in a snowstorm wearing a hot-pink archive Chanel coat fastened with a single button and a Christian Lacroix necklace draped over her bare stomach, in what can only be described as the most Rihanna way to let the world know she is expecting a baby.
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