Category Archives: World News

Nato leaders voice concern about threat China poses to world order for first time

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Beijing’s efforts to build up nuclear forces, hacking operations and increasingly close ties to Moscow are ‘serious challenges’, says Nato secretary general

China is not an adversary but it does represent serious challenges, Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, said on Wednesday, as the alliance agreed for the first time to include threats posed by Beijing into a blueprint guiding its future strategy.

While Russia’s war against Ukraine has dominated discussions at the Nato summit, China earned a place among the western alliance’s most worrying security concerns.

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Mystery as Canadian radio station plays Rage Against the Machine song nonstop

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Was it a protest by staff or marketing for a change of programming? Listeners to Kiss Radio 104.9 FM had plenty of time to wonder

Early on Wednesday morning, someone at a pop and soft rock station in Vancouver, Canada, began playing the song Killing in the Name by Rage Against the Machine.

Then they played it again.

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Russia-Ukraine war: Nato calls Moscow ‘the most direct threat to security and stability’ as it welcomes Finland and Sweden – live

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Latest updates: Ukraine says at least three people killed and five wounded after eight missiles hit southern city of Mykolaiv

More on the attack in Mykolaiv, in Ukraine’s south, near the Black Sea:

Reuters is also reporting that further east, in Lysychansk in the Luhansk region, a key battleground in Russia’s assault on the industrial heartland of Donbas, the governor reported increased military action.

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Reporter shot to death in Mexico, the 12th journalist killed there this year

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Attacks on the press have increased 85% in the three years since president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power

Yet another Mexican reporter has been shot to death, bringing to 12 the number of journalists killed this year in the country, one of the world’s most dangerous for media workers.

Antonio de la Cruz, 47, was shot on Wednesday as he was leaving his house with his 23-year-old daughter, who was seriously injured, according to state prosecutors and the newspaper that employed him.

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‘You destroyed so many lives’: R Kelly victims give emotional statements

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In a series of heart-rending speeches, victims delivered testimony about the impact his crimes had on their lives

The victims of R Kelly gave emotional testimony of the impact his crimes had on their lives during the sentencing hearing that saw the US singer given 30 years in prison.

In a series of heart-rending speeches, several women stood up in court, sometimes addressing their abuser, sometimes pausing for breath or holding back tears.

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Erdoğan gains from lifting Sweden and Finland Nato veto with US fighter jet promise

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Analysis: deal between Biden and Erdoğan is sealed in Madrid after Nordic countries vow to control support for Kurdish terrorism

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, immediately started to reap the rewards for lifting the block on allowing Sweden and Finland to join Nato when the Biden administration said it backed the potential sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey.

Speaking at a briefing call on Wednesday, Celeste Wallander, the assistant secretary for defence for international security affairs at the Pentagon, told reporters that strong Turkish defence capabilities would reinforce Nato’s defences.

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Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam found guilty of murder and jailed for life

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Abdeslam was only survivor of 10-man terrorist unit that struck in city, killing 130 people, in 2015

Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the 10-man unit that carried out coordinated terror attacks in Paris in 2015, has been found guilty of murder and sentenced to full life in prison, the toughest sentence available under French law.

Abdeslam, 32, a Brussels-born French citizen, was found guilty of taking part in the series of bombings and shootings across the French capital, which killed 130 people and injured more than 490.

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Russia condemns Nato’s invitation to Finland and Sweden

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Foreign ministry accuses Nato of ‘focusing on efforts to destabilise Russian society’

Russian officials have reacted angrily to Nato’s offer of membership to Finland and Sweden, calling it a “destabilising” effort that will increase tensions in the region.

“We condemn the irresponsible course of the North Atlantic Alliance that is ruining the European architecture, or what’s left of it,” Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on Wednesday.

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Unilever sells off Ben & Jerry’s in Israel to avoid West Bank row

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Move follows ice-cream brand’s decision to stop selling in Palestinian territories as it was ‘inconsistent’ with its values

Unilever has sold off its Ben & Jerry’s business in Israel in an attempt to extricate itself from a row over sales of the ice-cream in settlements in the West Bank.

Ben & Jerry’s independent board announced last summer that the brand would no longer sell its products in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying to do so was “inconsistent with our values”.

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Human rights fears affecting China’s standing globally, Pew survey finds

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Negative views of China at highest level in years in many of the 19 countries that took part in survey

Concerns about China’s policies on human rights have led to negative views towards the world’s most populous nation, a Pew public opinion survey has found.

Negative views of China remain at or near historic highs in many of the 19 countries polled in this year’s survey, which spoke to people in North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. The findings are largely consistent with Pew’s previous study in 2020, but with some countries now reporting even more unfavourable views of China.

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Canadian woman loses her home amid government payroll debacle

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Fiasco involves automated system that has led to 200,000 government workers being overpaid, underpaid or not paid at all

A woman in Newfoundland has lost her house after the government of Canada stopped paying her while she was on contract with its own revenue agency.

Joanne Nemec Osmond’s ordeal is the latest case in a debacle surrounding an automated payroll system which has led to 200,000 government workers in the country being overpaid, underpaid – or not paid at all.

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Israel delays travel restrictions on West Bank in apparent gesture to Joe Biden

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New rules limiting ability of foreigners to enter occupied territory are postponed before US president’s Middle East visit

Israel has delayed the implementation of strict rules limiting the ability of foreigners to enter and stay in the occupied West Bank, in what is believed to be a gesture to Joe Biden before the US president’s visit to the Middle East next month.

A statement from the high court on Wednesday said the new rules would be shelved until early September, as a decision had not yet been made regarding objections to the proposed policy.

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El Salvador to escalate its security crackdown after death of police officers

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President Nayib Bukele vowed to step up its ‘war on gangs’ even as 2% of the country’s population is jailed

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has vowed to escalate his controversial “war on gangs” after three police officers were killed in what appeared to be the first major reaction to a security crackdown that critics have called one of the most dramatic in recent Latin American history.

Bukele’s government claims more than 43,000 Salvadorians have been thrown in jail since it imposed a “state of exception” in late March – leaving almost 2% of the country’s entire adult population behind bars.

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‘It’s a sham’: Egypt accused of restricting protest in run-up to Cop27

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Climate activists say plight of jailed Alaa Abd El Fattah shows protesters’ voices will be ignored at Sharm el-Sheikh summit

Five months before a pivotal UN climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, one of Egypt’s most prominent political prisoners remains behind bars. Now on his 89th day of a hunger strike, Alaa Abd El Fattah is subsisting on just a hundred calories a day, normally in the form of skimmed milk or a spoonful of honey in his tea.

Abd El Fattah, a figurehead of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, has spent most of the past decade in prison. First jailed for organising demonstrations against a law that in effect banned protest altogether, he was re-arrested in 2019 during anti-government protests in which he had no involvement, and last year was sentenced to a further five years in a maximum security prison on charges of “spreading false news undermining national security”, for comments about torture on social media.

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Israel braces for fifth election in less than four years

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Poll set for October after collapse of short-lived coalition that ousted Benjamin Netanyahu from office

Israel is set for its fifth election in less than four years after the approval of a bill to dissolve parliament, following the collapse of a short-lived coalition government that banded together to oust the longtime prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from office.

Members of the Knesset voted unanimously on Tuesday in favour of the bill, with a deadline of midnight on Wednesday for it to be finalised as law.

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Chinese invasion of Taiwan ‘would be catastrophic miscalculation’

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Trade should be directed at countries who can be trusted, says British foreign secretary Liz Truss

China would be making “a catastrophic miscalculation” if it invaded Taiwan, Liz Truss has said, telling the Nato summit that the UK and other countries should reconsider trading relationships with countries that used economic power in “coercive” ways.

In a sign of how far UK government attitudes towards China have shifted since the self-declared “golden decade” under David Cameron, the British foreign secretary said trade should be directed at countries that could be trusted.

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UK to lift import restrictions on food from Fukushima

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Remaining curbs on food imports imposed after 2011 nuclear disaster to be scrapped

Food from Fukushima will be freely available in the UK from Wednesday, weeks after Boris Johnson snacked on popcorn from the Japanese prefecture hit by a triple nuclear meltdown in March 2011.

Britain restricted Fukushima imports after the disaster, the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl, but has gradually lifted them, even as other countries limit or ban produce from the region.

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Jubilation and hope as convention puts final stamp on Chile’s new draft constitution

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Draft shifts country away from Pinochet-era document, enshrining cultural rights and laying out path of autonomy for Indigenous peoples

The process of drafting Chile’s new constitution has come to an abrupt, jubilant end as the final votes were held quickly by the 154-member, gender-equal constitutional convention.

Huddling between the colonnades at the former congress building in Santiago, which has played host to Chile’s constitutional process, the delegates hugged and cheered as the draft was finalised.

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Ex-White House aide delivers explosive public testimony to January 6 panel

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Cassidy Hutchinson tells committee Trump knowingly directed armed supporters to march to the Capitol

In explosive public testimony, a former White House aide told the January 6 committee Donald Trump knowingly directed armed supporters to march to the US Capitol in a last-gasp effort to remain in power.

Appearing at a hastily scheduled hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, painted a devastating portrait of a raging president spiraling out of control and a White House often too ambivalent to constrain him.

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Boris Johnson claims Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he was a woman

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Prime minister says Russian president’s gender a contributory factor to Ukraine invasion

Boris Johnson has claimed that Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he was a woman and believes that the war is a “perfect example of toxic masculinity”.

In an interview with German media following the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau, the prime minister cited the Russian president’s gender as a contributory factor to the conflict.

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