Thirty years of BBC World News

The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature says he thought the phone call telling him he’d won was a cold caller. Luckily, Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah was persuaded not to hang up. Speaking to the BBC’s Ros Atkins, he says he was making a cup of tea when the phone rang, telling the…

A leading campaigner for women’s rights in Afghanistan was evacuated from Kabul last week, after going into hiding.

In the United States a person’s willingness to get vaccinated against Covid-19 varies by religious affiliation, with white evangelicals being the least likely demographic to get the vaccine, the Pew Research Centre has found. Nine out of ten atheists would definitely or probably get a vaccine or have already had one, compared to 77% of…

Chris Fox looks at the best of the week’s technology news stories including: US tech company Yahoo ends its presence in mainland China Facebook says it will end the use of facial recognition on the social network to identify and tag people in photos Game streaming site Twitch adds a new category for animal livestreams…

Several European countries have paused the use of a coronavirus vaccine over the safety concerns, but delays to the rollout of coronavirus vaccine programmes will have an economic fallout, a professor of economics at Koç University, has said. When there is a slowdown in vaccination programmes people who are not immunised will need to minimise…

Germany’s decision to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine for use in over 65 year olds has been welcomed, by the German Society for Immunology. Dr Carsten Watzl told BBC World News: “Given the data that came out of Scotland and England it’s been proven that it is effective and there is no question about the safety…