Five Yemenis and 15 foreign workers held as Iran-backed group steps up its campaign against international agencies
Houthi rebels have detained 20 employees at a UN facility in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen.
They are holding five Yemenis and 15 international workers but released another 11 after questioning them on Sunday. It was the second raid on a UN building in Sana’a in 24 hours.
Continue reading...Jury says documentary about killing of Argentinian campaigner Javier Chocobar brings ‘a measure of the justice’ denied by the courts
A documentary about the murder of the Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar has taken the top prize at the London film festival, with the jury calling it “a measure of the justice” that has long been denied by the courts.
The Argentine film-maker Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary, Landmarks, won the best film award in the festival’s official competition, it was announced on Sunday.
Continue reading...Ukraine’s president calls for meeting of European-led ‘coalition of the willing’ on his return from talks with Trump
Ukraine’s president has urged allies against appeasing Russia after returning from a trip to the US, where he failed to secure long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy had flown to Washington after weeks of calls for the weaponry, hoping to capitalise on Donald Trump’s growing frustration with Vladimir Putin after a summit in Alaska failed to produce a breakthrough in the war.
Continue reading...Soldier’s is first reported defection to South Korea across 248km militarised zone since August 2024
A North Korean soldier has defected to South Korea across the rivals’ heavily fortified border, South Korea’s military has said.
The military took custody of the soldier who crossed the central portion of the land border on Sunday, South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said in a statement. It said the soldier expressed a desire to resettle in South Korea.
Continue reading...End of almost two decades of leftist rule could revive ‘war on drugs’ in change of approach to coca cultivation
Bolivians go to the polls on Sunday in an election that, whatever the result, will mark a complete shift to the right after nearly 20 years under the rule of the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas).
The country’s first-ever presidential runoff pits the centre-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 58, who won the first round in August, against the rightwing former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, 65, who in recent weeks has overtaken Paz Pereira in the polls.
Continue reading...Authorities urge UN to intervene ‘to protect unarmed civilian populations’ after attack on bus that killed 11
Gaza’s media office has accused Israel of violating the ceasefire with Hamas 47 times since the truce came into effect in early October, killing 38 Palestinians and wounding another 143.
“These violations have included crimes of direct gunfire against civilians, deliberate shelling and targeting, and the arrest of a number of civilians, reflecting the occupation’s continued policy of aggression despite the declared end of the war,” reads the statement.
Continue reading...Officials say reopening of gateway between Gaza and Egypt would depend on Hamas returning remains of dead hostages
The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt will stay closed “until further notice”, Israel has said, after the Palestinian embassy in Cairo said the territory’s sole gateway to the outside world would reopen on Monday.
The statement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said reopening Rafah would depend on how Hamas fulfils its ceasefire role of returning the remains of all 28 dead hostages. Israel’s foreign ministry earlier said the crossing would probably reopen on Sunday.
Continue reading...Releasing them from US custody evades thorny legal issues regarding military detention of suspected drug smugglers
The Trump administration is moving to send the two survivors of Thursday’s strike in the Caribbean overseas rather than seek long-term military detention for them, four US officials and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Saturday.
The source, who like the US officials spoke on condition of anonymity, said the survivors were being sent to Colombia and Ecuador.
Continue reading...Decommissioning Hamas weapons seen as major stumbling block, with British diplomats advising on process
A European and US-backed UN security council motion to give a planned international stabilisation force robust powers to control security inside Gaza is being prepared, with the strong expectation that Egypt will lead it, diplomats have said.
The US is pressing for the force to have a UN mandate without being a fully fledged UN peacekeeping force and will operate with the kind of powers given to international troops operating in Haiti to combat armed gangs.
Continue reading...Canada isn’t helping to repatriate refugee applicant Mahin Shahriar, a 28-year-old Bangladeshi man, his lawyer says
A refugee applicant living in Canada is trapped at a US immigration detention facility after he says he mistakenly crossed the border, but his lawyer says Canada isn’t helping to bring him back.
Mahin Shahriar, 28, who came to Canada from Bangladesh in 2019, told the Canadian Press he accepted an invitation from a “friend” to visit a property near Montreal, which he now suspects was part of a broader human trafficking operation.
Continue reading...Tehran terminates 2015 deal under which sanctions were lifted in return for curbs on country’s nuclear programme
An international deal with Iran designed to keep the world safe from the spread of atomic weapons has officially ended, with Tehran announcing the termination of the decade-old agreement.
Iran said on Saturday that it was no longer bound by the 2015 agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), under which international sanctions were lifted in exchange for limitations on Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Continue reading...Renowned 1957 Nobel prize winner worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics
Chen Ning Yang, one of the world’s most renowned physicists and a Nobel prize winner, died on Saturday in Beijing at the age of 103 after an illness, state media outlet Xinhua has reported.
Born in eastern China’s Hefei in Anhui province in 1922, Yang was a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles in elementary particle physics.
Continue reading...BPA, a synthetic chemical used in production of plastics, found in baby products made by three big European brands
A chemical linked to impaired sexual development, obesity and cancer has been found in baby dummies manufactured by three big European brands.
Dummies made by the Dutch multinational Philips, the Swiss oral health specialists Curaprox and the French toy brand Sophie la Girafe were found to contain bisphenol A (BPA), according to laboratory testing by dTest, a Czech consumer organisation. Philips said they had carried out subsequent testing and found no BPA, while Sophie la Girafe said the amount found was insignificant.
Continue reading...Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers
Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.
The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.
Continue reading...Former Republican US representative walks free after being sentenced in April to more than seven years in prison for deceiving donors and stealing identities of 11 people
Donald Trump announced on Friday he had commuted the sentence of George Santos, the disgraced former New York representative and serial fabulist who had been sentenced to more than seven years in prison after a short-lived political career marked by outlandish fabrications and fraudulent scheming.
Santos left the Federal Correctional Institution Fairton in New Jersey just hours later and was “on his way home”, his attorney Joseph Murray told Agence France-Presse by phone late on Friday.
Continue reading...President says Venezuelan counterpart ‘doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States’
Donald Trump used an expletive to threaten the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, on Friday, claiming that the leftist autocrat had offered major concessions to appease the US.
The US president was speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday during a meeting with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Continue reading...In the six attacks on similar vessels launched by Trump, this is the first where any survivors have been reported
The US has seized survivors of a military strike on a suspected drug-carrying vessel in the Caribbean, the first since Donald Trump began launching deadly attacks in the region last month, according to officials in Washington.
Trump later confirmed the attack, telling reporters that the targeted vessel was a narco-submarine.
Continue reading...The president is seen to have accelerated the financial crisis, social inequalities and the rise of the far right
Three French governments have collapsed in less than a year, and the political crisis looks likely to continue, overshadowing Emmanuel Macron’s last 18 months in power and his domestic legacy.
This week, the latest minority government narrowly survived its first vote of no-confidence. But it remains the weakest cabinet in decades and could be toppled at any moment if opposition parties join together to oust it. France now faces a brutal two-month battle in parliament to achieve what once seemed the most basic element of governance: passing a budget.
Continue reading...UN official says: ‘Whether meningitis … diarrhoea, respiratory illnesses, we’re talking about a mammoth amount of work’. This live blog is closed
We’ve got a bit more from the UN’s World Food Programme on the situation in Gaza.
WFP spokeswoman Abeer Etefa told a media briefing in Geneva that, from Saturday until Wednesday, around 230 trucks with 2,800 tonnes of food supplies crossed into Gaza.
Continue reading...Prime minister says CGIL head is ‘clouded by resentment’ and accuses the left of hypocrisy towards women
Giorgia Meloni has condemned the boss of Italy’s biggest trade union after he referred to the prime minister as the “courtesan” of Donald Trump.
Maurizio Landini, the leader of CGIL, which organised several pro-Palestinian protests before the Gaza ceasefire deal, made the remarks on TV on Tuesday, the day after world leaders, including Meloni, met in Egypt for a Middle East peace summit.
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