Sources at the dorms of the Anna Regina Multilateral School in Essequibo are angry over a report in Guyana Times about the students being affected because the kitchen was out of “essential food items.”

The Duke of York has answered questions about his links to Jeffrey Epstein for the first time, in a BBC interview. He spoke to BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis in an interview recorded at Buckingham Palace on Thursday.

Maitlis said it was a “no holds barred interview”, which will be broadcast on BBC Two at 21:00 GMT on Saturday. The duke faces serious claims over his ties to the 66-year-old US financier, who took his own life while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.

In 2015, Prince Andrew was named in court papers as part of a US civil case against Epstein. One of Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Roberts – now Virginia Giuffre – said she was forced to have sex with the duke three times between 1999 and 2002, in London, New York and on a private Caribbean island owned by Epstein.

At the time she was under-age according to Florida state’s law.(BBC)…[+]

For the second year in a row, Canada has refused visas to dozens of researchers – most of them from Africa – who were hoping to attend an artificial intelligence (AI) conference in Vancouver. The hassles have caused at least one other AI conference to choose a different country for their next event.

The Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS), which brings together thousands of experts and researchers from all over the world, will be held in Vancouver next month. Last week, NeurIPS began hearing that several attendees had had their visas denied.

It was the second year in a row the conference has had visa troubles. In 2018, when the conference was held in Montreal, more than 100 attendees were denied visas.

The issue prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to defend Canada’s immigration system during the G7. “I can assure you that Canada is world-class in the way that it approves visas and encourages people from around the world to come participate in important global conversations like these,” he told Wired Magazine at the G7 in 2018. “I’m sure that  there will be people looking into what you have described.”

This year, event organisers had been working with Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada to try to make the visa process smoother, providing a list of names of people invited to attend the conference. But still problems persisted.(BBC)…[+]