A Tokyo medical school systematically cut women applicant’s entrance exam scores for years to keep them out and boost the numbers of male doctors, Japanese media said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made creating a society "where women can shine" a priority, but women still face an uphill battle in employment and hurdles returning to work after having children, despite Japan’s falling birthrate.

The exam score alterations were discovered in an internal investigation of a graft allegation that emerged this spring over entrance procedures for Tokyo Medical University, the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said.

From 2011, it said, the university began cutting the scores of female applicants to keep the number of women students at about 30 percent, after the number of successful women entrants jumped in 2010.

The paper quoted university sources as saying the action was prompted by a "strong sense at the school" that many women quit medicine after graduating to get married and have children.

Tokyo Medical University spokesman Fumio Azuma said an internal investigation had already begun after allegations this spring of bribery involving the medical school admission of the son of a senior official of the education ministry.

"Of course, we will ask them to include this in their investigations," he said, adding that the results of both investigations could come as early as this month.

Social media erupted in anger at the reports, with some posters demanding more steps to ensure equality while others said similar things were happening everywhere.

"It feels as if the earth’s crumbling under my feet," wrote one. "Who are you kidding with ‘Women should play an active role’?"

Another said, "Women are told they have to give birth; if they don’t, they’re mocked as being ‘unproductive’, but then again, just the possibility that they might give birth is used to cut their scores. What’s a woman supposed to do?"

At least 34 people are reported to have died in a fresh outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, including one healthcare worker, the World Health Organization says, as officials scramble to contain the deadly virus in the restive eastern part of the country.

As of August 6, 43 Ebola cases have been reported primarily in North Kivu province, an area that has been beleaguered by decades of violence, with an additional 33 suspected cases currently undergoing laboratory tests.

It is the tenth Ebola outbreak in the country, and news of the most recent cases came just days after the previous outbreak in the DRC was declared over on July 24, in which 33 people also died.

While there is no evidence yet that confirms the recent outbreaks are related, a connection can’t yet be ruled out, said World Health Organization spokesperson Tarik Jašarević.

FAQ | Ebola

The conditions in the area of the new outbreak are extremely challenging. Several armed militia groups have been fighting for control of mineral-rich North Kivu for years, a conflict that forced 1.7 million people to flee their homes in 2017. In December, at least 15 United Nations peacekeepers from Tanzania were killed in the region.

Today than one million displaced people live in the area, with residents and traders routinely moving across local borders with Rwanda and Uganda.

All of this makes for a logistical nightmare for the people trying to trace the movement of one of the world’s most ruthless viruses.

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In the DRC’s last outbreak in western Equateur province, there were also “massive logistical constraints,” says Mr Jašarević.

But workers were still able to travel hundreds of miles by motorbike to trace people who had come into contact with the virus, a vital part of its containment. In North Kivu, however, the same work may have to do be done with armed escorts when traveling outside cities.

“The prolonged humanitarian crisis and deterioration of the security situation is expected to hinder response to this outbreak,” says Mr Jašarević.

Médecins Sans Frontières, which has played a key role in the Ebola virus outbreaks that were first identified in 2014, says it has responded to the most recent outbreak.

“We have teams on site, currently setting up treatment centres and supporting the existing local health facilities in infection prevention and control, in order to help limit the possible spread of the disease and ensure continuity of care for the general population,” an MSF press officer in Johannesburg said on Monday.

After the virus was identified in Equateur in May, an experimental vaccine manufactured by the American pharmaceutical giant Merck was used early in the outbreak. It may have contributed to the outbreak’s quick containment and relatively low death rate. Between 2014 and 2016, more than 11,300 people died from the virus in West Africa.

There are still 3,200 doses of the vaccine that are currently be stored in the capital Kinshasa, and WHO says it can mobilize 300,000 more doses at short notice if required. The government has to approve the vaccine’s distribution by WHO before it can be given to people.

Health workers are now rushing to set up a cold chain to start vaccinating people in eastern part of the country on Wednesday, the DRC’s health ministry has said.

But the biggest constraint, says Mr Jašarević of WHO, will be “security and access issues and that ability to really determine the contacts of contacts of contacts.”

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Argentina’s senators have voted against legalising abortion, bucking the global trend and dashing the hopes of womens’ rights activists in the homeland of Pope Francis.

After a 15-hour session in the senate, watched on giant screens by campaigners on both sides camped outside, the motion was defeated 38 to 31. Women in the senate were equally split on the issue, with 14 female senators voting to legalise, and 14 voting to continue with the current prohibition.

Under Argentine law abortion is only permitted in the case of rape, a threat to the mother’s life or if the foetus is disabled.
 

The bill had sought to legalise abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and would have seen Argentina join Uruguay and Cuba as the only countries in Latin America to fully decriminalise abortion.  It is also legal in Mexico City. 

Only in the Central American trio of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua does it remain totally banned – last year the constitutional court in Chile, the last country to ban abortion in all cases, upheld a new law which would accept abortion under the same conditions as in Argentina.

Mauricio Macri, the Argentine president, praised "a mature parliamentary debate."

"The debate will continue," he said, adding that he was introducing policies to increase sex education in schools and widen access to contraceptives.

Politicians have to wait a year before they can reintroduce another bill.

The vote comes as a deep disappointment to womens’ rights activists, who celebrated in June when the lower house of congress voted narrowly to approve the bill, with 129 votes in favour and 125 against.

Convincing the more conservative senate, however, was always going to be challenging.   

Opponents of the bill gathered on Wednesday night at a "Mass for Life" at the Metropolitan Cathedral, the church of Pope Francis during his tenure as the archbishop of Buenos Aires.

"It’s not about religious beliefs but about a humanitarian reason," said Cardinal Mario Poli, the archbishop of Buenos Aires. 

"Caring for life is the first human right and the duty of the state."

Inside the senate, Cristina Kirchner, the former president, invoked Evita as she urged her fellow senators to support the reform, saying: “This problem is not going to go away.”

But she failed to convince her colleagues, and fireworks and shouts of joy erupted among anti-abortion activists as the result was announced on Thursday night. 

Pro-choice campaigners, many decked in the green scarves that had come to symbolise their movement, were downcast, and small pockets of violence broke out, with stones thrown at riot police, who attempted to disperse the crowd with tear gas and water cannons.

Miguel Angel Pichetto, an opposition leader in the senate, said pro-abortion campaigners would not be giving up.

"The future does not belong to the ‘No’ campaigners,” he said. 

“Sooner rather than later, women will have the decision they need, sooner rather than later we will win this debate."

Abortion laws around the world

Mariela Belski, Amnesty International’s executive director for Argentina, said the senate had “decided to agree on a system which forces women, girls and others who can become pregnant to undergo clandestine and unsafe abortions."

An estimated 500,000 illegal, secret abortions are carried out every year in Argentina, resulting in around 100 deaths.

"The Argentine lawmakers chose today to turn their backs on hundreds of thousands of women and girls who have been fighting for their sexual and reproductive rights," she said. 

The vote in Argentina followed a referendum in Ireland in May, which saw the legalisation of abortion in one of Europe’s last remaining holdouts.

Abortion is still banned in Andorra, Malta and San Marino, and only allowed if necessary to save a mother’s life in Poland, Liechtenstein and Monaco.  

Russian hackers have attacked a Swiss lab that analysed Novichok nerve agent samples from the Salisbury, according to local media. 

The state-run Spiez laboratory near Bern was targeted by hackers believed to be linked to the Russian government ahead of a conference of chemical and biological warfare experts in September, the mass-market Swiss newspaper Blick reported.

After Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury in March, the Swiss laboratory confirmed the British finding that they had fallen victim to the Soviet-developed military-grade nerve agent Novichok. 

British authorities have alleged Russia is behind the attack, a charge Moscow denies.  

Having created a fake email address to mimic the Spiez lab, the perpetrators sent a Word document to conference participants with malware embedded inside of it, the Federal Office for Civil Protection told the newspaper. 

“Someone has posed as the Spiez laboratory. We immediately informed the conference invitees that the document was not ours, and pointed out the danger,” Kurt Münger of the office said. 

It was not clear if any participants had opened the document and been infected, but Mr Münger said the lab had “not registered any outflow of data”.

The Moscow-based cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab found that the hackers had Russian language skills, according to the report. 

The Spiez lab confirmed that Sandworm, a group of hackers widely believed to be linked to Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, was suspected.

The German publication Spiegel previously reported that Sandworm attacked two German public broadcasters along with the Swiss lab in June. 

Cybersecurity experts have accused Sandworm of knocking out Ukrainian power grids in 2016.  

Swiss intelligence has fingered the Russian government for previous cyberattacks on organisations in the country, including the International Olympic Committee and IT companies. 

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claimed in April that the Spiez lab had found the Western-made BZ nerve agent in the Salisbury samples, but the Swiss facility responded on Twitter that there was no doubt that the substance used was Novichok.

The Department of Homeland Security said this month that the GRU military intelligence agency had infiltrated power plants across the United States.

The Spiez lab focuses on chemical, biological and nuclear warfare and is part of the country’s civil defence network.

A British-Bangladeshi businessman who was accused of being involved in the 2016 terror attack on a bakery in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka has been freed, but his wife has told of her fears for his health after two years in detention. 

Hasnat Karim had eagerly planned an evening of celebration for his daughter’s 13th birthday at the popular upmarket Holey Artisan Bakery Café.

Instead July 1, 2016 turned into a night of terror for the family of four after the restaurant was stormed by gunmen claiming allegiance to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Held hostage for 12 hours and witness to the killing of 24 people, Mr Karim’s wife and two children were traumatised further by his arrest and…

A British actor edited out of the BBC adaptation of an Agatha Christie drama following accusations of rape has had charges against him dropped for insufficient evidence.

Ed Westwick, 31, vehemently denied the accusations against him when they were made in November.

The BBC, however, decided to remove the Christie drama, Ordeal by Innocence, from its Christmas schedule.

And in January they went one step further, announcing that Westwick would be edited out and his scenes reshot, with Christian Cooke playing his role. Fellow cast members including Bill Nighy, Anna Chancellor, Anthony Boyle and Alice Eve were to join Cooke on location in Scotland to shoot the new scenes, which eventually aired later in the year.  

On Friday prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that they had dropped charges against Westwick.

The Stevenage-born actor, best known for his role on Gossip Girl, was accused in November of raping two women and sexually assaulting a third in 2014. 

Actress Kristina Cohen made the first allegation in a post on Facebook, writing that Westwick held her down and raped her at his home in West LA.  Two more women – actress Aurelie Wynn and Rachel Eck – came forward with their own accounts.

Prosecutors said on Friday in a memo that two of the women provided witnesses to help corroborate their accounts, including some who were outside the room where the alleged incident took place. But the evidence was inconclusive, they said.

“Those witnesses were not able to provide information that would enable the prosecution to prove either incident beyond a reasonable doubt,” prosecutors wrote.  “Prosecution on those two incidents is declined due to insufficient evidence.”

The memo also states that some additional women made allegations of inappropriate touching, but that the incidents fell outside the statute of limitations.

Westwick denied the claims against him from the beginning, calling them “provably untrue.”

His lawyer, Blair Berk, told TMZ on Friday that it was “clear from the start” that the accusations were “absolutely untrue”.

“It is a shame there are those who prejudged this case and that it took over eight months for Ed to be officially cleared of all of these charges,” he said. 

“I hope that those who made such quick judgment here not knowing anything about the abundant evidence of innocence in this case will hesitate next time before they so publicly accuse someone who has committed no wrongdoing."

The south Indian state of Kerala has been hit with the highest rainfall in a century leaving more than 300 dead, after widespread flooding submerged roads, power lines went down and dams reached bursting point.

Pinarayi Vijayan, the state’s chief minister, said on Twitter: “Kerala is facing its worst flood in 100 years. 80 dams opened, 324 lives lost and 223,139 people are in about 1500+ relief camps.” 

The 324 death toll includes fatalities from a previous bout of monsoon storms last month, and includes the fatalities since last week which is thought to be up to 175. 

Narendra Modi, the prime minister, was due to reach Kerala Friday evening to help manage the disaster, after attending the funeral of the former Indian leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in Delhi.

A red alert has been issued in all 14 Keralan districts, with the central government activating all three wings of the armed forces in a gargantuan rescue operation. Helicopters airlifted people from their roofs and dam gates were flung open as torrential rain battered the state non-stop for nearly a fortnight. 

Tourists were warned against travelling to the state and the airport in the city of Kochi is closed until August 26. “The situation is bad here and it is understandably closed for tourism now, while we deal with the rescue efforts”, said Thomas Joseph, General Manager of the travel company Kerala Holidays.

Speaking to The Telegraph from Kochi, he said: “It’s still raining so heavily it’s not safe for air travel really, but even many of the roads across the state are submerged or slippery. But we hope that in two or three days the storms will break, and we can try and get on with rebuilding. 

“While many parts of Kochi are not too bad, some areas around it, especially near the Periyar River are badly flooded." 

People stranded in the hill station of Munnar, one of the main tourist sites in Kerala, say hotel rooms lie vacant, most places have lost power and there’s little phone reception, with roads submerged by mud. 

Officials warn that hospitals in the state are facing a shortage of oxygen and petrol stations are running dry. The fierce storms have caused grave damage to crops and properties that the state estimates to be over Rs 80bn (£1bn).

Several appeals have been launched online and tech companies joined the rescue efforts. Amazon India has appealed to customers to donate clothing and items for shelters, while Google and Facebook developed tracking programs to help find stranded people.

Domestic airlines have been asked to keep a fixed maximum on air fares for flights to and from Kerala by the central government, and telecom companies pledged free call and data services for users in the state during the crisis.

Kerala is a popular destination for foreign and Indian visitors due to its idyllic beaches and rivers, picturesque houseboats and fresh seafood. Over 1 million foreign tourists visited the state last year, according to official data.