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United Kingdom

BRITISH police vowed this week to review any new evidence that Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum authorised the use of spying software to hack the phones of his ex-wife and her Uk-based legal team.

This follows a British court ruling on Wednesday that the phones of Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, her lawyers and others were hacked using Pegasus spyware during the couple’s acrimonious divorce custody case in London.

Presiding judge Andrew Mcfarlane concluded Sheikh Mohammed was “prepared to use the arm of the state to achieve what he regards as right”, noting the surveillance of at least six phones was attempted. | AFP

Auction

A BRIDGE depicted by author A A Milne in his children’s books about honey-loving teddy bear Winnie-the-pooh has sold at auction for more than twice its estimated price, a Uk-based auctioneer said this week.

Built in 1907 in Ashdown Forest in southern England but later replaced and restored, the bridge fetched £131 625 (about R3 million) in a sealed bid, auctioneer Summers Place Auctions said.

Originally known as Posingford

Bridge, it captured the imaginations of generations of children as “Poohsticks Bridge” where the bear protagonist invented a game dropping sticks and pine cones into the water below. | AFP

Nobel prize

TANZANIAN-BORN novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose work focuses on colonialism and the trauma of the refugee experience, won the Nobel Literature

Prize this week.

Gurnah, who grew up on the island of Zanzibar but who arrived in England as a refugee at the end of the 1960s, is the fifth African to win the Nobel Literature Prize.

The Swedish Academy said Gurnah was honoured “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”. | AFP

United States

THE Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said this week it had a new group to focus on China and the national security challenges it posed.

The China Mission Center was formed “to address the global challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China that cuts across all of the agency’s mission areas,” the CIA said.

Agency director William Burns said the CIA would continue to focus on “an aggressive Russia, a provocative North Korea and a hostile Iran”. | Reuters