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At least 300 people have been killed in a fresh wave of intercommunal fighting in South Sudan, authorities say.

Dozens of homes in Jonglei state were destroyed, warehouses belonging to aid groups were raided, and women and cattle were abducted. Three aid workers were among those killed.

A treaty aimed at ending the country’s six-year civil war was signed in February, but intercommunal violence has erupted a number of times since. Some 800 people are believed to have died in such clashes since February.

The latest outbreak of violence between pastoralists, who rely on livestock, and farm workers began on Saturday in the north-eastern town of Pieri, forcing thousands of people to flee to the bush.

Health workers says many of the victims have gunshot wounds. Some of the injured have been airlifted to the capital, Juba, for treatment. One of the aid workers killed was from Médecins Sans Frontières.

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At least a dozen supercomputers across Europe have shut down after cyber-attacks tried to take control of them.

A pan-European supercomputing group says they seem to have tried to use the machines to mine cryptocurrency.

“A security exploitation” disabled access to the Archer supercomputer, at the University of Edinburgh, on 11 May.

Staff said they were working with the National Cyber Security Centre to restore the system, which had recently installed a pandemic modelling tool. “We now believe this to be a major issue across the academic community as several computers have been compromised in the UK and elsewhere in Europe,” the team said.

The NCSC said: “We are aware of this incident and are providing support. “The NCSC works with the academic sector to help it improve its security practices and protect its institutions from threats.”

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France has condemned the reported sentencing of a French-Iranian academic to six years in prison in Iran.

Fariba Adelkhah was handed a five-year term for conspiring against national security and one year for propaganda, her lawyer Saeid Dehghan said. But he added that he expected the sentences would be served concurrently.

The 61-year-old anthropologist and researcher at Sciences Po university in Paris was detained in June along with her French colleague Roland Marchal. Mr Marchal was released in March this year as part of a prisoner swap.

The French authorities freed Jalal Rohollahnejad, an Iranian engineer who was being held over accusations that he violated US sanctions against Iran.

In recent years, Iran has arrested dozens of foreign and dual nationals on national security charges. Some, including British-Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, are on temporary release because of the coronavirus pandemic.

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German police investigating links between the military and the far right have seized weapons and explosives at the home of a special forces soldier.

The 45-year-old sergeant major in the elite KSK special forces command has been under investigation since 2017. Reports say he had hidden a cache of weapons at his home in Nordsachsen in the eastern state of Saxony.

German military intelligence (MAD) said in January there were 592 suspected far-right cases in the army last year.

In March, officials said they had identified 27 people as far-right extremists. The KSK, considered the most secretive unit in the army, is seen as a particular problem.

It has some 1,000 soldiers trained for crisis situations such as freeing hostages abroad and 20 of them have reportedly come under investigation. Germany’s Spiegel website says action has been taken against nine of them.

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Twelve people arrested on suspicion of terror offences have been found dead in their police cells in Burkina Faso.

The prosecutor for the town of Fada N’Gourma said 25 people had been detained overnight on Monday, and “unfortunately, 12 of them have died during the course of the night in the cells they were being held in”.

The cause of death is currently unknown. Security sources told AFP news agency it may have been asphyxiation. An investigation has been launched.

In a similar episode in July 2019, 11 people accused of drug trafficking were found dead in a cell belonging to the national police’s drugs squad.

It comes less than a month after Human Rights Watch (HRW) said it believed Burkina Faso security forces had executed 31 unarmed men in the northern town of Djibo, a few hours after arresting them in a counter-terror operation.

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